Kieth Posted May 13, 2007 Report Share Posted May 13, 2007 (edited) Well, here's my story. I installed Mandriva Spring, and everything went very well. I used the grub boot loader. After just a couple of days, I thought I would try lilo. I didn't like it, so I went back to grub. That's all I did - honest!!! Well, after that it wouldn't load for anything. After booting up the computer, after BIOS kicked in, I just got a blank screen. I tried the rescue disk, but it still wouldn't boot up. If I re-installed the Windows boot loader, I was able to get into WXP, though. Anyway, after much tinkering around, I finally put the Mandriva dvd in, re-booted, and "up graded", then had it re-put my boot loader on the "first sector of drive (MBR)". Still nothing. I did it again, this time choosing to put the boot loader on a floppy. That solved the problem! Now, if some kind computer genius could just tell me what to do to be able to boot up without my floppy, I would really appreciate it. I thought about deleting the boot loader files, both lilo and grub, then re-doing the "up-grade", but before doing it, I thought I would ask for advice. I suppose there is a "proper" way of just editing one of the files. My system and the grub boot loader files are (I can't find the old lilo boot loader): # uname -a Linux localhost 2.6.17-14mdv #1 SMP Wed May 9 21:11:43 MDT 2007 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ GNU/Linux /boot/grub/menu.lst timeout 10 color black/cyan yellow/cyan gfxmenu (hd1,0)/boot/gfxmenu default 1 title windows root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 title mdv Linux kernel (hd1,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-14mdv BOOT_IMAGE=mdv_Linux root=/dev/hdb1 resume=/dev/hdb5 splash=silent vga=788 initrd (hd1,0)/boot/initrd-2.6.17-14mdv.img Thanks, Kieth Edited May 18, 2007 by Kieth Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted May 13, 2007 Report Share Posted May 13, 2007 (edited) The "problem" is at the MBR, and it's well known that LILO under circumstances cannot overwrite grub, as well as several other primary bootloaders. I suggest booting from your Mandy CD, chrooting to your installed system and running grub-install /dev/hda Before doing that you do have to backup your menu.lst, and put it back after installing grub to the MBR. And BTW replacing Grub with LILO is anachronism, at the very best... and you definitely should not do it, since you aren't familiar with their intricacies. Edited May 13, 2007 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kieth Posted May 18, 2007 Author Report Share Posted May 18, 2007 OK, I took care of the problem. I tried doing what scarecrow said, but obviously made a mistake somewhere. Then I couldn't boot up for anything! I just did a clean install. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted May 18, 2007 Report Share Posted May 18, 2007 Even Mandriva now acknowledges that Lilo has lived past its use by date. Grub is now the default bootloader in Mandriva Spring. I gave up on Lilo almost 3 years ago. If you look at forums, over the years, dealing with bootloader problems involving Lilo the problems are almost identical. It is not that Lilo necessarily had bugs but that it was so user unfriendly and did not tolerate user mistakes lightly. By the way if you have a problem like this in the future, a simpler way to get back to normal is to to a dummy upgrade rather than a reinstall. This way you get easy access to setting up the bootloader correctly again and all your user settings remain intact. I know the CLI fans don't like me saying so but it has always worked for me and newbies don't get tangled up. :D Cheers. John Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kieth Posted May 18, 2007 Author Report Share Posted May 18, 2007 I did a dummy upgrade, but I messed up things so bad, that even that wouldn't work! Kieth Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted May 18, 2007 Report Share Posted May 18, 2007 Yes. Sometimes we have those kind of days. :D :D :D Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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