lilo problem

[Steve Johnson]

Use a DOS boot disk that has fdisk on it and type fdisk /mbr

this will fix your main boot record.

-Steve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "E Frank Ball" <frankb at efball.com>
To: "nblug-talk" <nblug-talk at afterburner.sonic.net>
Cc: "Bill Marlin" <bill_marlin at agilent.com>
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 1:03 PM
Subject: lilo problem


> 
> 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 
>