Re: Floppy boot

[Ruediger Berlich <nospam [at] suse.de>]

Hi Ian,
which version of Linux are you using ?

> I'm struggling to get linux up and running on a computer and every time I
> try I get Lilo failing at the LI bit. I have found a tutorial on the net
> which says this is quite a common problem with some of the newer hard drives
> and recommends fixing it by inserting the line 'linear' into lilo.conf.
> Fine, but how do I get at lilo.conf on the hard disk if I am booting from a
> floppy? I tried to 'mount /dev/hda' as a first guess but the floppy linux
> said that it couldn't find it in fstab. Help!!!

The 'LI' just represents an error message. The forst stage of the boot
loader (the one stored in the MBR) prints 'LI'. When the second stage (the
one on your boot partition) gets started, it prints 'LO', which altogether
is 'LILO'. Now, if for whatever reason the second stage cannot be
accessed, you will only get 'LI'. The most common reason is, that your
boot partition is completely or partially above 1024 cylinders (the
cylinders of all harddrives must be added). Lilo at this stage of the boot
process uses BIOS functions. The PC BIOS is unable to access data beyond
1024 cylinder. The cure for this is therefore to have a bootpartition,
that lies completely below 1024 cylinders. If this is not possible,
because of your present partitioning, you might want to use a utility such
as 'loadlin.exe' (a simple DOS program, that gets installed on the DOS
partition and boots a Linux kernel stored on the same partition (can be a
DOS/Windows partition). This solution avoids all interference with
Windows, by the way, so it is the most clean solution. I do not know, on
which Linux distribution this utility can be found (other than SuSE,
obviously). Another common source of your problem is, that you have
modified the Lilo installation (e.g. recompiled a kernel or changed
/etc/lilo.conf), without calling 'lilo' afterwards. The first stage of the
boot loader stores the absolute addresses (cylinders/heads/sectors) of the
boot data on your harddrive. If they have been modified, they are in
different locations and thus cannot be found, if the forst stage of the
bootloaded hasn't been updated by 'lilo' (done automatically nowadays by
most Linux configuration utilities).

Now, how can you repair the existing configuration ? No common answer
without the knowledge, which Linux distribution you're using. If it is
SuSE, boot from the CD and tell it to use an installed system. Then modify
the LILO installation according to your needs. Alternatively you might
want to start the rescue system from CD and mount the root partition, then
modify the <mountpoint>/etc/lilo.conf with e.g. vi (difficult).

For both methods you need to know the name of the roor partition. If
you're using SuSE, this will often be /dev/hda3 .

Your mount command wasn't entirely correct. You need to specify the
mountpoint and the partition number. The full command would look like

mount -t ext2 /dev/hda3 /mnt

assuming, that /dev/hda3 is your root partition and that a mount point
/mnt exists. Now you can access all data on the roor partition under the
directory /mnt.

Bye, Ruediger

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