lilo problem

E Frank Ball frankb at efball.com
Fri Feb 2 13:03:53 PST 2001


I was messing around with a RedHat 6.2 machine trying to get kernel 2.4
to work.  When I went to reboot lilo got as far as "L", then started
spewing:

L 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01...

I tried my boot floppy, but it couldn't find an "initial console".
Probably something I screwed up updating rpms for kernel 2.4.  Redhat
didn't seem to have all the updated I needed, so I improvised.  Bad
idea.

So I reloaded from scratch, reformatted the partions on sda (/ and /var)
and checked for bad blocks.  /home is on hda and it's fine.

Reboot and I get:

L 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01...

This time the boot floppy works, but I can't boot from the hard drive.
Lilo runs without any errors.  linear mode or not, it just spews.

I see in the lilo docs there is some error message "0x01", is this what
I'm seeing?  or am I seeing something different?  It says I shouldn't
see that error, and something about disc geometry.  This machine used to
work fine, so I don't see why it suddenly can't figure out the
geometery.  Their cure is to load DOS and run some program I never heard
of.  Not much help for somebody that will need days to figure out how to
boot DOS.

Does anybody know what's going on?  Is the boot sector of my hard drive
permanently fragged?  Can fdisk fix this?  Is this a bios problem?  The
bios seems to know what kind of drive it is.

Thanks for any help,

   E Frank Ball                efball at efball.com
   work: (707) 794-4168        home: (707) 538-3693 



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