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LILO doesnt work


wigimister
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I have sucessfully installed Mandrake 10.0 on an external usb hard drive, sda, and chose the graphical lilo setup, and selected my bood drive as hda(with windows xp).

 

when i reboot, i see L 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07, well abunch of 07s, so i am guessing lilo does not work. So i have no way to boot into either linux, on sda, or xp, on hda. I used my windows recovery console to fixboot, but this did nothing.

 

My question is how i can reinstall just lilo, or grub for that matter, and have both windows xp and mandrake on the choices list.

 

i am using another computer right now, and it is important that i can atleast get into XP.

 

Thanks for any help!

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i didnot do fixmbr because its warning scared me.

 

but, i can boot into windows now, because i used the mandrake rescue console to restore windows boot whatever...

 

so then i tried to reinstall Bootloader, but it doesnot work. it sais:

 

Please wait, trying to find your local root device...

Could not find your root device :-(

Died at /usr/bin/install_bootloader line19

<press enter to return to rescue gui>

 

what can i do to boot into linux now?

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I'm sorry, but I'm at work. I will check back later. I'd suggest searching the forum for lilo. There are way too many of these threads lately. Try some of the suggestions and post back what you find, giving us as much detail about your sys as possible, and we'll go from there. My frustration is not you....it's ML-10/kernel-2.6/partitions/mbr's :devil:

Edited by bvc
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Ok i will continue searching, but all the ones i have found so far are about lilo getting errors, not about its just not working at all. Well the problem mostly now is why the rescue console will not install a bootloader, as mentioned above.

 

Hopefully i can sort it out, but i am kinda paranoid about these mbrs, becuse last week i lost my movie and music video collections :cry: , on a partiton on the drive i was installing mdk on.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!! :mr-green:

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i think the problem is that you are trying to use an external USB drive as your boot device.

I tried doing this for my motherboard with an external USB cdrom drive and could not get it to boot from disk. This is probably your problem. You need to find some way (bios) to get usb up and running before boot sequence initiates. I think my motherboard has a USB MSDOS mode or something like that. It didn't help with the USB cdrom but it may work with a hard drive.

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but i dont even have a choice to boot to linux, it goes straight to windows. wouldnet it be possible to just have lilo or grub on my hda, the boot drive, pointing to sda for my linux partitions?

 

i can imagine there would be a way to be able to boot off usb, but my bios is very limited. there is an option for legacy usb support, which i have read does not effect linux at all.

 

once i have a choice for linux, then i will move on to the next problem (possibly as you say, i might need to allow booting from usb by changing something.

 

This would suprise me though, becuase mandrake allowed me to install to this drive, without telling me anything about not being able to boot from it.

 

What can i do to install a bootloader if the mandrake rescue does not work?

Edited by wigimister
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ok you'll need to mount the partition in read/write mode. to do that i think you coming you right click on the partition and go to Properties. then one of the tabs should have the option to mount as writable or something like that. Once that's done open up a console and do the foll. as root:

mount -t proc /proc /path/to/mdk/partition/
cd  /path/to/mdk/partition/
chroot /bin/bash  /path/to/mdk/partition/

Now it'll be just like you're booted into mdk for real. So just launch the lilo program

lilo

this should update the boot partitions and while your at it you could use drakconf to make a floppy for booting

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