In article <00030412273400.01344@Vagabond>,
Adrian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, 04 Mar 2000, Stefan Bellon wrote:
[snip]
> > 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?
You won't believe it (well, perhaps you will ;-) I just thought that
this afternoon as well, did it and - succeeded! :-D
That's not the ideal solution now, but much faster than booting the
kernel from a normal boot floppy. So only 512 bytes have to be read
from the floppy disc, then booting continues from the hard disc.
> 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.
Yes, that works nicely.
BUT: Why doesn't it work from the hard disc? If the BIOS detects the
boot sector on the floppy disc as valid, why doesn't it detect the same
boot sector on the hard disc as valid? Surely there can't be any
ambiguity concerning sector 0 of the hard disc, can there?
> 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.
Yes, I was taking this into my reflections as well and didn't try it
yet.
Thanks for the tip, BTW. :-)
Still, the question remains: /Why/ doesn't it work from the hard disc?
Till now I suspected that the BIOS detected the boot sector as invalid.
But this can't be anymore, as booting from floppy works. OR: floppy
disc boot sectors aren't checked at all by the BIOS. This would explain
it.
Greetings,
Stefan.
--
Stefan Bellon * <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * <http://www.sbellon.de/>
3 kinds of people. Those who can count and those who can't.
