On Sat, 04 Mar 2000, Stefan Bellon wrote:
> In article <00030413144000.00731@laptop>,
> Declan Moriarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > This is crystalysing for me into one simple problem: your BIOS does
> > not recognise the /boot partition with linux installed as a system
> > disk.
>
> That's the conclusion that I have drawn as well.
[snip]
> > The other real possibility here is that lilo is setting up a
> > different spot from the one the bios reads as the boot record.
> > One other idea worth a whirl is to use dd to read the boot record
> > and write loads of copies of it. As dd just copies the data, you can
> > 'format' your disk with boot partitions, (i.e. copy the boot sector
> > to every sector in the /dev/hda1 partition) and then try again. This
> > time it should read the boot sector, and then freeze, If this occurs,
> > you have a location problem.
>
> I don't quite understand this. You suggest something like
>
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 skip=1
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 skip=2
> dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 skip=3
Well, as long as (if) your going to be playing with dd, have you tried copying
out LILO to the boot sector of a floppy? If it is some conflict between the
BIOS, the disk, and LILO isn't were the BIOS thinks it should be it shouldn't
matter when booting from a floppy. Just copy LILO out of the MBR with:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
LILO should now boot from the floppy,which, in turn, can then boot Linux. Note
that the skip=[123] lines above would be dangerous as you would be writing into
the directory structure area of hda1. Then again, it not working now so have
fun.
Adrian
