adyx Posted December 10, 2004 Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 Hi ! I have recently upgraded my system to an Barton 2800 with an Asus A7V880 (KT880 chipset). I have installed Mandrake 10.0 OE and everything goes fine. When I try to boot after install, LILO doesn't load, it appears just an L on the screen. Same for 9.2 or 10.0 CE. Knoppix and Mandrake Move work fine on the sistem. I try to install LILO on a floppy disk : same problem. I have noticed a strange problem for Mandrake, it recognize the first IDE drive as /dev/hde and not /dev/hda . I have also noticed that this problem is only for the 2.6 kernel, with the 2.4 the drives are correct but still doens't load LILO. I suppose is not the MBR since it doesn't boot from the floppy. I have made a lot of changes in BIOS: nothing happend. Any suggestions ? Maybe a BIOS upgrade could resolve the problem ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted December 10, 2004 Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 It does sound like a MBR problem. The L's (there are a lot of them right?) would suggest so. Try editing your /etc/lilo.conf. Look if it is booting from the correct partition. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adyx Posted December 10, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 Look if it is booting from the correct partition. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I am an experienced user but this time I can't solve the problem myself. I know that /dev/hda is the master HDD on IDE1 but MDK recognize it like /dev/hde . It's a nonsense. Which is the correct partition ? If I can find why appear this problem I can solve it...I think... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted December 10, 2004 Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 All LLLLLLLLLL means that the MBR has been corrupted. You will have to clear the mbr first to get rid of that, then you will boot easily directly into your Windows as before. There are different previous posts that tell you how to do that. One that quickly comes to mind is to use a Windows 98 boot disk and when it reaches the A:\> Prompt then type in ............. fdisk /mbr ......... Note the space I suggest you insert your No1 cdrom and do a pretend upgrade and when it gets near the end , make sure that you select the bootloader install on your floppy at fd0 and not the MBR later again you will come to the boot up settings and again make sure that the boot loader is installed on the floppy fd0. What usually causes your kind of problem from a fresh install when you are not quite experienced to notice it, is that on the two occassions when the boot settings comes up, different settings are used and under these conditions LILO seems to screw up much more easily than does GRUB.(At least from my experience, hence I stick with grub regardless of others swearing by LILO. I was forever swearing at it.) That /dev/hde tells me that Mandrake is reading the drive as a SATA Hard drive. If it is not a SATA drive then it means that you have a Mainboard that is using an ATI chip as against Nvidia. ATI supplied a cheaper chip that could not have the sata aspect disabled even if you went through that routine in the BIOS. i.e. sata is always on. This does not effect operation because if you had two each of hard drives and Cdroms and they normally would be hda, hdb, hdc, and hdd then they now became hde, hdf, hdg and hdh. How do I know ??? I have an ASUS A7V600-X on my 2nd, and spare. box that has only Win2000Pro on it now but was temporarily used in my Mandrake main box. That part is nothing to worry about. Just get used to the new letter allocation. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adyx Posted December 10, 2004 Author Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 I can't boot in Windows because there are more than four years since I didn't use it anymore. :D The mainboard have only two channels for SATA so I didn't understand why is Mandrake reserving four (a-d). If that's the explanation... As I said in the first post, I have allready try to install LILO on floppy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted December 10, 2004 Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 I can't boot in Windows because there are more than four years since I didn't use it anymore. :D :D The mainboard have only two channels for SATA so I didn't understand why is Mandrake reserving four (a-d). If that's the explanation...As I said in the first post, I have allready try to install LILO on floppy. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I think the first 4 are reserved for IDE not SATA hence the first SATA is hde.. You can boot in rescue mode on the install CD by choosing F1 then mount your partitions..try the utility if not by hand mkdir /mnt/intall mount /dev/hde1 /mnt/install then you chroot into the hde environment chroot /mnt/install you will have no path so then things need explicity referencing check /etc/lilo then you can rerun lilo and recreate the MBR... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted December 10, 2004 Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 (edited) I don't think mandrake is reserving anything. It is a function of the mother board and Mandrake simply gets its information from the Mainboard and the drives. Just as you normally have two IDE channels on which you can place two devices on each channel, the same also applies to the two sata channels and they can have at least two devices each (maybe more but on that point I am not quite sure) Gowater is correct about Mandrake reserving the first four drive letters for IDE devices but if the Mainboard tells Mandrake that it is sata instead then naturally Mandrake moves to the next four letters. You cannot blame Mandrake for that. Check your mainboard manufacturers website and see if there is more data about the sata mode and I think you will find it IS a VIA chip and that sata cannot be switched off. Try following Gowaters suggestion. By the way, congratulations on being away from and free of Windows for so long I am 98% there. Cheers. John I have to make a correction here. All the time I was refering to the ATI chip I was really meaning the VIA chip.. Sorry about that but the gist is still the same. I just rechecked your Initial post and I am correct, it is a VIA chip as shown by the V in the version number. I have just checked the ASUS website and disgustingly they have no frequently asked questions for 2003 and 2004. JOHN. Edited December 10, 2004 by AussieJohn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durvish Posted December 10, 2004 Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 I think Gowator meant to say ---- mkdir /mnt/install Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted December 10, 2004 Report Share Posted December 10, 2004 The 10.0 kernel reserves hda through hdd for the first four sata devices. The first ide drive is hde. It's completely normal. More recent kernels and the one used in 10.1 designate the first sata drive as a scsi drive, sda and the first four ide devices are the traditional hda through hdd. You will get this naming convention even if no sata drive is connected if your mb has a sata controller. For your boot problems, I would try doing a fresh install and use grub instead of lilo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted December 11, 2004 Report Share Posted December 11, 2004 that's not my experience with 10.0 and SATA. As John said, I find that the SATA devices start at hde, not the IDE ones. When I boot my machine with MandrakeMove 2 (=MDK 10.0), its SATA hard disk turns up as /dev/hde, and its ATA DVD burner shows up as /dev/hda. Under 10.1, the burner is /dev/hda, and the hard drive is /dev/sda. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted December 12, 2004 Report Share Posted December 12, 2004 I stand corrected; haven't run 10.0 in a while and all my hard drives are on a pci controller card which normally starts with hde(on board ide controller takes hda through hdd). With the 10.0 kernel, hde through hdh are for the sata drives and my pci controller card drives were bumped up to hdi through hdl. Sorry for the confusion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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