I've pretty much resigned myself to stocking up on ammo, driving out to
Round Rock, and going postal at the local crappy PC manufacturer's
factory, but I thought I would post to this list just to make sure all
other options have been exhausted first.
To make a long story short, yesterday I replaced the zip drive in my Dell,
moving it in the process from the primary to the secondary IDE and leaving
the hard disk all by its lonesome on the primary IDE channel. (WHY is a
long story involving stuff not working in any other configurations despite
correct master/slave jumper settings, etc.. Like I said, crappy.)
Anyway, for some reason this caused lilo to hang at an LI
prompt. According to the documentation, this means the second stage boot
loader was loaded but failed to execute, either due to a geometry mismatch
or by moving /boot/boot.b.
Well, I didn't move boot.b, and I don't see how taking the zip drive off
the primary IDE channel could cause the disk geometry to
change. Furthermore, I can boot off a floppy and have no problem
accessing the linux partition on the disk to my heart's content; however
any and all attempts to rerun lilo have been a failure, that is to say
lilo claims to be running, offers up the correct bootable partitions, and
doesn't give any errors (with -v option), but I still get the same sad old
LI when I try and boot the machine (and yes, I tried using -i /boot/boot.b
for good measure. -r / is a must when booting from floppy).
I even tried booting from a DOS floppy and running fdisk /MBR in order to
clear out the master boot block, but as soon as I reran lilo, LI came
back. Even worse, linux fdisk works fine, and lets me make and save
minor changes to partitions, but lilo continues to not play nice.
I'm 99% sure that if I install Gates OS from CD it will clear up the
problem, by blasting the entire MBR to smithereens and letting me start
over again with lilo, but I f*cking hate resorting to this.
Any suggestions?
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