[NBLUG/talk] Install Help

Jeff Hemminger jeff.hemminger at gmail.com
Tue Nov 18 13:24:23 PST 2008


Sorry for the long delay in my response to this, and thanks, it really
helped me out.

I tried to specify the root partition in a number of different ways,
none of which seemed to work.

In the end, I punted and installed a different dist, and went with the
partition scheme you suggested.

Jeff

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 11:47 PM, Mark Street <mark at oswizards.com> wrote:
> Ahhhhh, our old friend lilo.  maybe you did not specify a root partition
> on install of lilo?  You may have not have done anything "wrong".
>
> lilo is running from the mbr if you are getting the lilo prompt requesting
> a root partition... but lilo cannot find the root partition which is why
> it is asking you for root...we don't know why at this point why
> root=/dev/hda2 is not defined since it is a fresh install.  you have two
> choices, give it the correct parameters on boot from the lilo prompt...
> but even if you give it the correct root=/dev/hda2 we still don't know if
> it will boot because lilo still needs to find the kernel and an initial
> RAM disk image if it is going to be used.. and we don't know what
> lilo.conf looks like. You will find out though as soon as you boot it with
> the root=/dev/hda2 parameter.
>
> I would try to a rescue disk (hint Knoppix) or USB drive to take a peek at
> lilo.conf and rerun lilo to install back to the mbr. (hint, chroot . and
> or lilo -r )  If you do go in and take a peek write down lilo.conf and
> post back to the list.  If it is too much, you can always re-install and
> start over with a clean slate.
>
> Do you plan to do a lot of development on this machine?  Lots of source
> code to compile and install?  Why a /usr/local on a laptop?
> Personally I would have used grub and a different partition scheme keeping
> / or /boot close beginning of the disk;
>
> /dev/hda1 = /
> /dev/hda2 = swap
> /dev/hda3 = /home ... if you really must split off /home
>
>> Hi Everyone,
>> I've been struggling to get Slackware installed on an Acer laptop. I'm not
>> really familiar with what's going on but I'm hoping some of you can fill
>> in
>> some pieces.
>>
>> I repartitioned my harddrive like so:
>>
>> /dev/hda1 - swap
>> /dev/hda2 - /
>> /dev/hda3 - /home
>> /dev/hda4 - /usr/local
>>
>> I went through the install process without incident, and selected the
>> default option for the LILO bootloader and the default option for
>> installing
>> the MBR.
>>
>> When the install completed I rebooted and (sorry I don't have the message
>> in
>> front of me) received an error asking me to add a root=___ param to the
>> boot
>> loading options.
>>
>> I take it to mean that the bootloader, LILO, cannot find the MBR. Is that
>> correct? I've tried passing in root=hda and root=/dev/hda2, but neither of
>> those options worked.
>>
>> Any help in explaining what I did wrong would be much appreciated.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at nblug.org
> http://nblug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>



More information about the talk mailing list