On 6 Mar 2003, Stephen Kuhn wrote: > I mucked up my system by trying to reinstall XP on one of the partitions > on my /dev/hda - of course, it hosed up my otherwise perfectly good, > perfectly working lilo. In trying to get BACK to my beloved and stable > RH, I made the /boot active via using FDISK (set active partition) and > on booting to linux, got LIL (and that was it).
Read the LILO README file. On RH 8.0, it is at /usr/share/doc/lilo-21.4.4./README You want to read the section on "LILO start message" (at line 2764 of 2928 or 93%) which explains what it means when it stops at L or LI or LIL or LIL? or LIL- and so forth. For stopping at LIL, you may also want to read the README section on "Disk geometry" (at line 1805 of 2928 or 61%). > I rebooted with the RH Installation CD 1, ran "linux rescue" then did > the "chroot /mnt/sysimage" - then ran "lilo" again - in the hopes that > it would put me back to where I was before I mucked up. No luck. I start > to get the boot, but end up getting the error about "image=" after it > loads half-way. So it ain't fixed. "I start to get the boot" Your description is really confusing me. Lets get some terminology out of the way: LI (in caps) - MBR portion of LILO, very simple code to jump to LO LO (in caps) - second stage of LILO, capable of loading kernel/ram disk /sbin/lilo (lower case) - known as "map installer" - reads lilo.conf, writes LI to the MBR and LO to /boot LI is to simple to generate "image=" errors. If your stopping at LIL then your not far enough into LO to get "image=" errors on boot. Rather, an error about an "image=" line usually is produced by the map installer (/sbin/lilo) and *NOT* provided during boot. If you /etc/lilo.conf has an invalid image= line such as point to a kernel image that does not exist or some other invalid parameter then it will not modify the MBR or /boot at all. The syntax of the /etc/lilo.conf must be fixed for the map installer to proceed. > I managed to do a "mkbootdisk" and make some modifications to it, but > I'm still without lilo. Are you looking to boot from floppy or hard disk? mkbootdisk is not intended to fix a hard drive install of lilo. > I've been through the man pages over and over again, have tried heaps of > different things to get it back, but am still stuck with the "image=" > bit. I'm lost. Don't want to reinstall, don't want to upgrade, just want > to get my lilo back to "normal". The man page for lilo is not very helpful. All the fun information is in the README file. One way to fix the problem is to do what you say you don't want to do. Force Anaconda to re-write the full syntax of your lilo.conf by doing a dummy upgrade. Anotherwords, use RH 7.3 CDs to re-"upgrade" a RH 7.3 box or use RH 8.0 CDs to re-"upgrade" a RH 8.0 box. During the upgrade, you will be prompted if you want to update the existing boot loader or install a fresh boot loader. Since your existing boot loader configuration file seems to be trashed, you want to choose to install a fresh boot loader to force Anaconda to write a brand new lilo.conf (or grub.conf). Anaconda will then continue on to reading existing package information and then do a really fast "upgrade" in which it doesn't actually install any packages since the ones on the hard drive are already equal or newer than the ones on the CDs. If Anaconda fails to write a working new lilo.conf then try using a new grub install instead. > Any hints, tips, fixes, anything short of sacrificing a goat? Might help us provide specifics if you provided the *exact* text of the error and a copy of the lilo.conf. Good luck -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
