lilo.conf & fstab corrupted after using DiskDrake

[RobF]

I had a little mishap which led to lilo.conf and fstab getting out of synch with the real layout of OS's and partitions on my machine. As a result, I can't access any of the Linux distros, Mandrake included, that I have on my machine, with the exception of Xandros whose lilo I installed in the MBR.

 

Up until yesterday, I had the following layout of partitions on my second HDD hdb:

 

hdb1 reiserfs Libranet

hdb2 extended primary partition comprising the logical partitions hdb5 through hdb9

hdb3 reiserfs Xandros

hdb4 swap (set up by Libranet)

hdb5 ext3 Mandrakelinux root

hdb6 swap (set up by Mandrake)

hdb7 ext3 Mandrakelinux /home

hdb8 ext3 Mepis

hdb9 reiserfs Yoper

 

Using QTparted, I shrank hdb1 to get some free space for yet another partition and then went about installing SAM in that partition. SAM is a reduced and customized version of Mandrakelinux 10.0 (shrunk to 200 MB) with Xfce as windows manager and a Mac OS X Panther theme. It's been put together by a fellow in Germany who used the Mandrake "make-live-CD" utility to remaster a customized Mandrake live CD distro. Hence, SAM uses the Mandrakelinux partition manager (DiskDrake) to install itself from the live CD to the HDD.

 

Everything appeared to go allright with the install, although I was slightly alarmed when the installer announced that the newly created partition in which SAM was to be installed would be named hdb5 and the original hdb5 and all higher partitions would be renamed to (original number + 1). I had expected that SAM would be installed in a new partition hdb10 and all the other partitions would remain the same. But then I thought that the Xandros boot manager would be able to sort that out and reassociate OS's and partitions during the scan of partitions and filesystems on bootup.

 

Previously, whenever I installed another Linux, I had a copy of the bootloader of that new Linux installed in the new root partition, not in the MBR. This allowed me to keep Xandros' lilo as the default bootloader. After each new install I would then boot into Xandros and Xandros would somehow discover that a new OS had been added and add the appropriate entries into fstab and lilo.conf and the Xandros boot splash screen.

 

However that didn't happen this time. No new entry appeared for SAM in the boot menu, and I cannot successfully boot anymore into any of the other Linuxes (at one point or another in the boot sequence the system will hang - lethal error). I can still get into Xandros.

 

Only afterwards I realized that SAM (being just a remastered Mandrake) very likely identifies itself to the system as "Mandrakelinux". So SAM probably went into hdb5 as bootable "Mandrakelinux". This partition had been the boot partition for an OS with the same name, i.e. "Mandrakelinux". Moreover, there is now a bootable "Mandrakelinux" in partitions hdb6 and hdb8, too. Perhaps this utterly confused lilo.

 

The layout of partitions on hdb after the install of SAM is as follows (as obtained with partimage and with the Mepis live CD partitions utility). As you can see, all the former hdb partitions from hdb5 and higher got bumped up one number.

 

hdb1 reiserfs Libranet

hdb2 extended primary partition comprising the logical partitions hdb6 through hdb10

hdb3 reiserfs Xandros

hdb4 swap (set up by Libranet)

hdb5 ext2 SAM

hdb6 ext3 Mandrakelinux root

hdb7 swap (set up by Mandrake)

hdb8 ext3 Mandrakelinux /home

hdb9 ext3 Mepis

hdb10 reiserfs Yoper

 

However, this new layout is not reflected in the Xandros lilo.conf; it is still the same as before the SAM install. Furthermore, fstab has been severely crippled (unfortunately, I did not save a copy of fstab before the SAM install). None of the Linuxes on hdb appear in it, not even the Xandros root system. Here is the current version of fstab.

 

/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /disks/C vfat rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0,showexec=no 0 0

/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 /disks/D ntfs ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,nouser,async,umask=0 0 0

/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 /mnt/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,nosuid,nodev,exec,user,noauto,async,unhide 0 0

/dev/fd0 /mnt/fd0 auto rw,nosuid,nodev,exec,nouser,noauto,async 0 0

proc /proc proc rw 0 0

usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs rw,devmode=0666 0 0

 

Also, the autogenerated map of devices in /etc/devices/devices.inf is not OK. In it, there are entries on [diskvol.ide.......] and [image.......] only for hda, none for hdb.

 

Does anyone have any idea what settings DiskDrake may have affected when it reassigned the partitions associated with the various Linux distros on hdb? How can I rectify the resulting corruption or truncation of lilo.conf, fstab and /etc/devices/devices.inf and any other system config files that may have been affected?

 

Your help would be much appreciated.

 

Robert