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LILO troubles


ffi
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Could you please be more detailed? What do you mean that "it doesn't work anymore?" Have you corrected the mbr previously or reinstalled lilo previously? Better yet, please state step by step what you are doing when entering rescue mode and what it says when it "fails".

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Do you also know what partition your Mandrake/Mandriva is on? If so, when you boot rescue mode, you can mount this partition, and then chroot it, and check that /etc/lilo.conf exists.

 

Then if this exists, you can then run /sbin/lilo to sort the boot loader.

 

So a brief set of notes.

 

Insert Mandrake/Mandriva CD1.
Press F1 and not enter
Type "linux rescue" without the quotes.
At the menu choose go to command prompt.
fdisk -l /dev/hda will list partitions on your first ide disk.

 

If this is where Mandriva is, then you should then see maybe two, three or four partitions.

 

/dev/hda1 - would be windows

/dev/hda5 - would be root

/dev/hda6 - would be home

/dev/hda7 - would be swap

 

this is normally the default partitioning when you automatic partition, unless you've changed it. If you changed and did manually, then you'll prob have an idea which is your root partition.

 

So, let's assume /dev/hda5 is root. So to continue:

 

mkdir /mnt/root
mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/root
ls /mnt/root

 

now you should see directory listing. I would then suggest doing:

 

ls /mnt/root/etc/lilo.conf

 

does it yield good results? If so:

 

chroot /mnt/root /bin/bash
/sbin/lilo

 

watch for results. Does it work? If not, post back so we can see what is happening. This is manual way to sort your boot loader out if the menu option doesn't seem to be working.

 

Make sure you get the correct partition. Make sure the etc directory exists, and that there is a lilo.conf. If there is, then sort the bootloader and see what happens. If a problem, check the contents of the lilo.conf file to see if it points to installing on /dev/hda.

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Sure, you just need to specify sending to /dev/sda instead of hda. hdxx corresponds to ide drives, whereas sdxx corresponds to sata and scsi drives.

 

Providing of course, the rest of the configuration is then pointing to the drive for the operating system you should be fine. The line you want to change in /etc/lilo.conf is:

 

boot=/dev/sda

 

and then run /sbin/lilo to update.

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Well I´m back able to get Mandriva booted and have my SDA running but Windows is still not working :(

 

With the windows cd I´m able to logon to the partition, though chkdsk (from the XP CD) says the disk has one or more unrecoverable errors, Mandriva is also not able to mount the partition. Does it mean the windows partition is lost? I get the following errors:

 

An error occurred while loading media:/sda1:
The file or folder media:/sda1 does not exist.

 

Could not mount device.
The reported error was:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda1,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

Edited by ffi
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Mandriva does not mount anything by default under /media (not sure about the latest Cooker). The "media:/sda1" is a virtual mount point (= not existing in fstab) KDE VFS uses for removable USB drives, and not for harddisk partitions.

Can you post your /etc/fstab ?

Edited by scarecrow
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 # This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>	   <dump>  <pass>
proc			/proc		   proc	defaults		0	   0
/dev/hda3	   /			   ext3	defaults,errors=remount-ro 0	   1
/dev/hda2	   /media/hda2	 ext3	defaults		0	   2
/dev/hda5	   /media/hda5	 vfat	defaults		0	   0
/dev/sda1	   /media/sda1	 ntfs	defaults		0	   0
/dev/sda2	   /media/sda2	 ntfs	defaults		0	   0
/dev/hdc		/media/cdrom0   udf,iso9660 user,noauto	 0	   0
/dev/hdd		/media/cdrom1   udf,iso9660 user,noauto	 0	   0

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So, you have no swapfile? :D

No /dev/hda1 ? Why?

Who told you to make your fstab like that?

Can you repeat cooly, what harddisks you have there, and how they are partitioned?

Plus: Do you have two optical drives, connected to the same IDE bus, or not?

Edited by scarecrow
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So, you have no swapfile? :D

 

I have 1.5 GB of mem :D

 

Who told you to make your fstab like that?

It was made automatically

 

Can you repeat cooly, what harddisks you have there, and how they are partitioned?

Plus: Do you have two optical drives, connected to the same IDE bus, or not?

 

I have 2 disks, one IDE with 2 ext3 partitions and 1 fat partition and one SATA with 2 ntfs partitions. I have 1 DVD player and one CD-Writer. Actually when I looked in my fstab earlier today there where 16 CD-roms but I deleted those entries....

 

(BTW: my fstab looked like this a couple of weeks ago: https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&show...ndpost&p=224239 but I reformatted one fat partition to ext3)

Edited by ffi
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A lot of that fstab file looks like one you'd see on a Red Hat system. They always put removable or optical media under /media partition.

 

I would check to make sure where all your partitions are and make sure the fstab file identifies them correctly based on the partitions on your hard drives, and how many you have etc. Try to return to your previous fstab, you might find it works much better, but keep it inline with any changes you've made subsequently from your previous posting of your fstab.

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I put back the older fstab file, changing hda2 to reflect the changes I made but still I don´t have my windows xp back.

 

I changed the bootloader to grub and get the following error:

 

Root (HD0,0)
Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x7
chainloader +1

 

(LILO gives no error but simply shows a blach screen with a blinking curus when I try to boot into XP)

Edited by ffi
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It should normally by hd0,0 and not HD0,0. It could be a case sensitive issue. The grub section for Windows should look like this:

 

title=Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,5)
makeactive
chainloader +1

 

if course, substitute your partition number with the one I have above, since this is just an example. It's the rootnoverify line for the partition.

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