Eh, this may not be a lilo problem at all. Linux may be getting an erroneous report about the hard drive size (of the primary or secondary) and the location of the boot sector of the secondary.
This would result in the behaviour you have seen. The initial installer may have received an erroneous report, now when you run LILO it's putting the location of the boot sectors at the wrong place in it's table. Of course it could be backwards. -JMS -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Ivan Offalich Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2001 8:58 PM To: Mandrake Newbie Subject: [newbie] LILO issues with 2 hard drives. I looked all over the Linux Documentation Project website for this information. I couldn't seem to find it anywhere so I was hoping someone could help me with it on this list. I'll explain my situation. I have two hard drives installed on my computer. hda is dedicated to Windoze. hdc is dedicated to Linux. When I install Linux (I've gone through the process a few times) it has me choose between LILO and GRUB. I have chosen LILO since I've read more about it than GRUB and I have a better understand of how it works. After installing and booting up, I get the choice of booting Linux-Secure, Linux, Linux Failsafe, or Windoze. Everything works fine like it should. When I installed I tried both the normal boot and also the nicer looking boot (the equivalent of "vga=791" in the config. file), they both worked fine. The trouble comes afterwards. I edited my /etc/lilo.conf file, saved it, and then typed "lilo" into the shell. It returned a confirmation that the file was edited properly. When I restarted my computer the BIOS went through its normal checks and when it got to the "OS Loading..." part the screen starts filling with "01 00 01 00 01 00 01 00 01" etc. I understood that this meant my MBR was corrupted, so I did a fdisk /mbr from my DOS bootdisk. This allowed me to get into Windoze normally and I could of course get into Linux using my Linux bootdisk. I restored the /etc/lilo.conf file to its original condition and typed "lilo" once more. When I restarted my computer the next time I got the same 1s and 0s. Considering that I took much care into editing the /etc/lilo.conf file originally, this leads me to believe that it wasn't the result of a typo in the file. What it does lead me to believe is that the installation process writes to the MBR differently than LILO does from Linux. I'm not sure if that's the case though. It's also possible that I'm doing something wrong somehow that I don't realize. Is it possible that hda isn't being mounted properly before it's being written to? Does the fact that the drive is used for Windoze make a difference in this case? Is there something else I'm overlooking here? I'd appreciate any help that anyone can offer to fix this problem. I'd like to be able to boot into Linux without a floppy disk again and be able to use LILO properly. Ivan.
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