On Wednesday 30 May 2001 13:12, Olaf Stetzer wrote: > > Here is the relevant compatibility code relating to boot-compat.b. The > > sole difference between boot-compat.b and boot.b is that boot-compat.b is > > produced with BROKEN_BIOS_COMPATIBILITY defined (so it won't boot NT4). > > > > _main: > > #ifndef BROKEN_BIOS_COMPATIBILITY > > cli ! NT 4 blows up if this is missing > > #endif > > > > I expect that your MBR boots NT4 and as I believe that the problem is the > > laptop can not use a boot loader that works with NT4 I think it's likely > > that your code will not work with it. However I don't know for sure as I > > can not spare the time required to read the code at the moment. > > I have no windows at all on my notebook, but there was a minimal sort of > dos on it when I bought it. I think that the dos mbr remained on the hdd > until my problems started and I played around with lilo and mbr.
OK, here is what I think happened. I think that previously you were not using the Debian MBR and you had a DOS MBR loading the LILO code from /dev/hda2. Then when things broke with LILO you over-wrote the DOS MBR and things really went wrong. Now you said that boot-compat.b didn't work, was that when you had boot=/dev/hda or boot=/dev/hda2? To use boot-compat.b and gain any benefit from it you MUST have boot=/dev/hda ! > > Another option that probably hasn't been considered. Boot up dos and run > > "fdisk /mbr" to put the DOS MBR on it. I'm certain that no-one has > > released a PC which is unable to boot DOS... If LILO is then installed > > to /dev/hda2 and /dev/hda2 is marked as active in the partition table > > then DOS should load up LILO and things should be fine. > > OK, good idead I will try to organize a dos bootable disk with fdisk and > try it that way! That should work. Also putting boot-compat.b in /dev/hda is likely to work as well. I would really like to know whether boot-compat.b works for you and would greatly appreciate it if you could try this. -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
