On Sun, 27 Feb 2000, E Justin M Rowles wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've borrowed the above (Acer Extensa 501DX, P233, 3Gb) laptop to use as
> a sandbox with RedHat 6.1 prior to putting it my own laptop.
>
> The RH install process reports success all the way through, but on
> booting the new install I get a gpf pretty much as soon as the kernel
> comes up. Anyone got any idea what might cause this, and what the hell
> I can do about it?
>
> I'm loath to install on my real machine till I've had a play on another
> one, you see. In the meantime, I've just put Windows back on it, but
> that won't boot now either, which is a pity cos I've either got to buy
> it or return it with Windows on in a week! It now comes up with a
> "LIL-" prompt (no typo) and then nothing will happen, which rather
> implies that the MBR is up the spout. Anyone got any ideas on that
> either?! I've never come across an install process that doesn't
> correctly handle the MBR.
You're going to have to boot off a DOS floppy to restore the MBR. There
was a DOS command that took a parameter /MBR to restore the master boot
record. I think it was fdisk /MBR.
>From /usr/doc/lilo*
LILO de-installation
--------------------
In order to stop LILO from being invoked when the system boots, its boot
sector has to be either removed or disabled. All other files belonging to
LILO can be deleted _after_ removing the boot sector, if desired.*
* Backup copies of old boot sectors may be needed when removing the
boot
sector. They are stored in /boot.
Again, _when removing Linux, LILO must be de-installed before (!) its
files
(/boot, etc.) are deleted._ This is especially important if LILO is
operating as the MBR.
LILO 14 (and newer) can be de-installed with lilo -u. If LILO 14 or newer
is currently installed, but the first version of LILO installed was older
than 14, lilo -U may work. When using -U, the warning at the end of this
section applies.
If LILO's boot sector has been installed on a primary partition and is
booted by the "standard" MBR or some partition switcher program, it can be
disabled by making a different partition active. MS-DOS' FDISK, Linux
fdisk
or LILO's activate can do that.
If LILO's boot sector is the master boot record (MBR) of a disk, it has to
be replaced with a different MBR, typically MS-DOS' "standard" MBR. When
using MS-DOS 5.0 or above, the MS-DOS MBR can be restored with FDISK /MBR.
This only alters the boot loader code, not the partition table.
LILO automatically makes backup copies when it overwrites boot sectors.
They are named /boot/boot.<nnnn>, with <nnnn> corresponding to the device
number, e.g. 0300 is /dev/hda, 0800 is /dev/sda, etc. Those backups
can
be used to restore the old MBR if no easier method is available. The
commands are
dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 or
dd if=/boot/boot.0800 of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1
respectively.
_WARNING:_ Some Linux distributions install boot.<nnnn> files from the
system where the distribution was created. Using those files may yield
unpredictable results. Therefore, the file creation date should be
carefully checked.
