Willem - thanks for all your help. I've made a little progress here but not much. I finally found a floppy from which I can boot into Linux, proving that the installation, apart from the boot loader, is good.
Prior to that I did not trust the installation. I could never boot to Linux from LILO whether Linux or DOS was the default. I decided to try GRUB. After a little learning curve, I figured out how to make a GRUB floppy. ( I did not want to put anything on the boot loader yet). From this boot floppy I was able to boot into grub and from there I was able to boot Windows 98 quite nicely. When, however, I attempted to give the commands to boot linux (I am pretty sure I got them right, see below) the boot started but died with the last line printed being mxt_scan_bios: enter At that point the machine was hard frozen. Even ctrl-alt-delete did nothing. I had to turn the machine off to reboot. The commands I gave to grub were root (hd0,1) (my /boot directory is on the /dev/hda2 partition) kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 (this, too, is correct for my system) boot I also tried another variant with initrd /initrd-2.4.7-10.img between the kernel command and the boot command but that made no difference. I need to also tell you that in the Upgrade installation, I encountered the following warning message: "Unable to align partition properly. This probably means that another partitioning tool generated an incorrect partition table, because it didn't have the correct BIOS geometry. It is safe to ignore but ignoring may cause (fixable) problems with some boot loaders." Well, I guess this jibes with the fact the original partitioning was made with Partition Magic. So another question is "OK, if this is fixable, how"? One more question: On the boot loader configuration screen there is an option "Force use of LBA32 (not normally required)" with no explanation. What is LBA32 and would I benefit from using it? Willem van der Walt wrote: >Is tthe default system that you want to boot the Linux or the win? >You could try to put >default = lin >into y0our lilo.conf if you have the statement >label = lin >in the description of the linux image. >It should then boot your linux from where you can fix things further. >Even though lilo does not accept keystrokes, does it end up at >Lilo boot? >Each letter of the name lilo shows how far in the booting process it went >before it got stuck. >I don't know what means what, but if it only gets to li and then stops, >using Linear usually do the trick. >This might sound obvious, but make sure the statement >root = whatever refers to the correct partition. >hth >regards, Willem > >On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Steve Cohen wrote: > >>OK, installed LILO. It doesn't really work. When lilo comes up for me, >>it refuses to accept keystrokes, so nothing happens until the delay >>period is over and then it just boots the default system. Any ideas here? >> >> >>Steve Cohen wrote: >> >>>Any ideas on why the boot-floppy generator failed? It had no trouble >>>writing to the floppy. I don't think it's a disk-media problem. It >>>seems more likely that the installer is writing a bad floppy. What's up >>>with that? Is this a known problem with the RedHat installer? Is it >>>related to the switch to ext3? >>> >>> >>>Willem van der Walt wrote: >>> >>>>I would suggest you go into rescue mode and try to get lilo installed on >>>>the boot sector from there. >>>>regards, Willem >>>> >>>>On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Steve Cohen wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>>>Aargh! I am in upgrade hell. >>>>>I tried to upgrade a system that was running 7.0 to 7.2. It is a >>>>>dual boot system with Win 98 running in the other partition. The >>>>>hard drive was partitioned originally using Partition Magic. >>>>> >>>>>OK. I started the upgrade and I didn't think it through clearly >>>>>enough. When it asked me what kind of loader I wanted to use, I >>>>>thought I should just continue using Partition Magic, so I selected >>>>>"do not install a boot loader". I followed the advice and upgraded >>>>>to an ext3 file system. I chose all my upgrade packages and the >>>>>system upgraded itself. Smoothly, it looked like. I made a floppy >>>>>and was done. >>>>> >>>>>Of course, it didn't work. Partition Magic didn't know doodly squat >>>>>about my new ext3 file system and hung when I tried to boot it. Win >>>>>98 still worked. Ah I thought, I would boot off the floppy. But >>>>>that failed, said it failed to boot, so was useless. >>>>> >>>>>So I got rid of Partition Magic. Uninstalled both it and its >>>>>companion, Boot Magic. I thought I would go back into the upgrade >>>>>and try the new GRUB loader. So I rebooted to the CDROM once again, >>>>>went through the upgrade rigamarole, added a couple of packages, but >>>>>when it was all done, it said I hadn't changed the kernel, therefore >>>>>it wouldn't write the boot image to disk!! Even though I'd changed >>>>>the loader. Tried GRUB, LILO, no matter what I did after this point, >>>>>it would not write the boot image. I even went in and installed the >>>>>debug kernel thinking it would see this as a kernel change and write >>>>>the boot image out. Nope. >>>>> >>>>>So I'm stuck here with what is probably a perfectly good Linux >>>>>partition that cannot load because the installer refuses to write the >>>>>boot image, and cannot generate a good boot floppy! (Oh yeah, I >>>>>tried writing it out again to another floppy with the same results). >>>>> >>>>>This is REALLY annoying. Is there something I can do in the upgrade >>>>>process to FORCE it to write the boot image? >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>_______________________________________________ >>>>>Redhat-list mailing list >>>>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>>>>https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list >>>>> >>>>> >>>> >>>> >>>>_______________________________________________ >>>>Redhat-list mailing list >>>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>>>https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list >>>> >>>> >>> >>> >>> >>>_______________________________________________ >>>Redhat-list mailing list >>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>>https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list >>> >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Redhat-list mailing list >>[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list >> > > > >_______________________________________________ >Redhat-list mailing list >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list > _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
