On Fri, 3 Mar 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I swapped motherboards between 2 of my linux machines both machines were
> running RH 6.0 at the time, and booted fine from their hard disks. after
> swapping boards I had to use a boot floppy to boot the machines. after
> running lilo both machines still failed to boot from the hard disk I get
> 'LI' and nothing else.
LILO prints out a letter for each stage of the loader bootstrap. To quote
the README file:
[Just 'LI' indicates that the] first stage boot loader was
able to load the second stage boot loader, but has failed to
execute it. This can either be caused by a geometry mismatch
or by moving /boot/boot.b without running the map installer.
In other words, LILO loaded the secondary loader, but had some problem
executing it. This can mean something (like the secondary loader) moved
around on the disk, so LILO's idea of where it was located is now out of date.
In practice, I have found this error can be caused by damn near anything.
One thing I've had fix it: Boot an MS-DOS floppy, re-run "FDISK /MBR", and
then reinstall LILO using "/sbin/lilo". No, I don't know why this helped, but
it did. Worth a shot.
> I recompiled my kernel, still the same error
FWIW, this error occurs before LILO is trying to boot the kernel, so it is
unlikely that would fix things. (OTOH, it was worth a shot. ;)
> I re-installed linux, still doesn't work...
This is bad. Reinstalling Linux should fix just about anything short of a
partition geometry problem. Read on.
> I did not swap drives when I swapped MBs, however the scsi disk has a
> scsi enabled kernel, and the IDE disk has an ide enabled kernel, so I
> don't see why this matters...
I think what you've got here is a geometry translation problem.
Today's large disks easily exceed certain limits in the crufty old PC BIOS
design. (Actually, large disks from several years ago do, let alone today's.)
To get around this, various geometry translation schemes are implemented in
the firmware which remap the disk sectors into a different order, one which
doesn't encounter those limits.
Problems arise because different vendors implement the translations in
different ways. Switching from one disk controller, motherboard, or BIOS to
another can actually have the effect of randomly scrambling the order of your
disk sectors.
To further complicate matters, the Linux kernel cares not about the BIOS,
and accesses the disk the way it was meant to be accessed, using Linear Block
Addressing, while LILO is limited to the world of real-mode INT13 and the
inordinate kludges present in it. As near as I can tell, the process of
mapping linear disk sectors to the C/H/S notation LILO has to use is the
deepest, darkest sort of black art.
Now, at this, point, you've got two choices: Figure out the black magic
needed to tell LILO how your disk is *really* laid out, or zero the partition
table and start from scratch. I've never heard of the former actually being
done successfully, and given that you've already reinstalled Linux at least
once, you might as well just start from a clean slate.
To do so: Boot from CD or floppy, and obtain a root shell. Execute the
following command ...
***** WARNING: THIS WILL DESTROY ALL DATA ON THE DISK *****
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk bs=1024 count=1
Replace "/dev/disk" with whatever your disk(s) is (are), /dev/hda and
/dev/sda being the most common. Note that you are specifying the entire disk
here, not just a single partition.
Issue a "sync", reboot, and start the install. You will need to recreate
your partitions and make the filesystems again.
> the windows 98 installation on hda is unbootable, it broke pretty badly
> when i switched boards, and I haven't cared about it enough to fix it
> yet... does this matter?
Define "unbootable". Does MS-Windows load most of the way, then go bananas
trying to figure out your hardware? If so, that is normal. According to
Microsoft's tech support, no version of Windows will survive a change in
motherboard. You have to reinstall the entire system. Nice design, there.
On the other hand, if MS-DOS cannot even find the C: drive correctly, you've
run into a geometry translation problem. See above.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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