[H-GEN] lilo down, I'm bummed

[Tony Nugent]

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On Fri Apr 05 2002 at 19:56, Tony Nugent wrote:

(I just love talking to myself :-)

> Do it like this:
> lilo -r /mnt

> One hint... it is sometimes an advantage to have the system bootable
> from a boot floppy.  If the boot sector is put onto a floppy disk
...

> In lilo.conf, change the line that tells lilo where to write its boot
> sector:
> boot=/dev/hda
> to this:
> # boot=/dev/hda
> boot=/dev/fd0

Ahh, I should have mentioned two things.

You don't actually need to edit lilo.conf to put the boot sector
onto a floppy... simply run lilo like this:

lilo -r /mnt -b /dev/fd0

(where the -b parameter over-rides the boot=bootdev parameter in the
config file).

If you are using a version of lilo on your rescue system that is
different to the one that is installed on your real system, there is
a risk that the attempt to write the boot sector will fail, or that
the boot sector will not work as expected.

  I hit this problem using tomsrtbt with more recent distributions.
  The version on the root-boot disk is an old version that
  completely fails to re-create lilo boot sectors on these systems.
  (Most likely this is because of different formats of the map file
  and so on).

  The solution to this is to run the version of lilo that is
  installed... and you can do this by changing root like this:

  chroot /mnt /sbin/lilo -b /dev/fd0

  (which chroots to /mnt and runs /sbin/lilo from there).

  (tom's rootboot won't currently allow chroot'ing to a 2.4.x-based
  system, and it doesn't know about ext3 or reiser/lvm and so on.
  But that's another story).

  (You can find tomsrtbt at http://www.toms.net, there is a new
  version out, 1.7.366, which will be the last of the 1.x series
  before Tom releases 2.x that uses a 2.2.x kernel).

  If you boot from a rescue disk that came with your distribution
  (eg, redhat's installer also doubles as a useful rescue system),
  then you'll be using the same version of lilo that is on the hard
  drive.

  If you use mondo/mindi as a boot/rescue disk solution, then it is
  even more convenient because you are using exactly the same
  kernel, libraries and utilities in the rescue system that are in
  your installation.

Another hint:  Often it is useful to change root with a running
shell into your install, this is the most convenient way I have
found to do that:

  HOME=/root chroot /mnt /bin/bash --login

  (If /mnt/proc has been mounted same as /proc, then that can be
  helpful for allowing you to do maintenance things with the
  hardware in the chroot'ed environment.  Also, other partitions
  need to be mounted as per /mnt/etc/fstab onto /mnt/).

I hope all this woffle is helping...  :)

Cheers
Tony
---*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=---
  Tony Nugent <Tony at linuxworks.com.au>
  LinuxWorks - Gold Coast Qld Australia

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