On Tue, 07 Mar 2000, Stefan Bellon wrote:
> In article <00030613465000.00579@Vagabond>,
> Adrian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> [large snip]
>
> > DISCLAIMER - This may be extremely dangerous and I take no
> > responsibility for any damage done, hard drive crashes, power
> > failures, strife, disease, mass kaos, inter-planetary shifts,
> > global-thermo-nuclear war, or that coffee mug your going to throw off
> > the table and break when this doesn't work as advertised. I replaced
> > the first character "�" (0xfa) with a "�" (0xeb) so LILO now reads
> > "��l...LILO....!.". I did it this way.
> > 1) Make a copy of your LILO to work on:
> > dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/good_LILO bs=512 count=1
> > 2) Make the hacked LILO
> > dd if=/good_LILO of=/hack_LILO bs=1 skip=1 count=1
> > dd if=/good_LILO of=/hack_LILO bs=1 skip=1 seek=1 count=511
> > 3) Copy it to new floppy (or if you're daring the hda1 assuming the
> > MBR is still a DOS MBR).
> > dd if=/hack_LILO of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
>
> Is this meant to be taken serious? IIRC, the 0xfa 0xeb at the start is
> a JMP command in Assembler. When the boot sector gets executed, this
> jumps over the "LILO" or "whatever" strings to the position where the
> actual boot code lies. If I modify that - well - I might end up in
> nirvana as well.
>
Yeh, I know, that's why I said it's dangerous. I thought it was probably a JMP
of some kind but I didn't have an assembly book handy and I haven't worked
much assembly any time recently (or any x86 for that matter, just Z80). I was
just going on the theory that maybe the BIOS is looking for the first byte(s)
to be something specific and hacking blindly to find something that still works.
Like I said, a real stretch.
> Does the above boot for you?
>
Yes, surprisingly enough. I placed it in hda2 of my 486 and then rebooted DOS
MBR -> hda2 boot sector (LILO) -> Linux no problems.
Tomorrow I'll try decoding exactly what this does.
> > It's a stretch, I know, but I'm out of ideas.
>
> Me too, except the strong knowledge, that the SystemSoft BIOS is crap.
> A friend of mine had yet another idea what may be breaking everything.
> But that would be even more heavy than my suspicions: The BIOS doesn't
> look at the MBR at all ("there's only one MBR around anyway"), but
> directly boots the partition marked as active. And this is only done,
> when this bootsector "looks" good (where "looks" = "some stupid test").
>
Hummm, I guess it's a possibility, but like everything else at this point,
without further indepth BIOS knowledge (which your not likely to get out of
SystemSoft or ?Innysys? [ I forgot the name they handed it off to ] ), it's just
grasping at straws. I did a lot of looking around the web and found a few
people running Linux on Gericom 1100ATs, but no one running 1100MT and no
one having in similar problems.
It's to late to think, I'm going to bed.
Adrian
