[PLUG] lilo: fails to open

Bill Spears bspears at easystreet.com
Wed Jul 3 02:14:14 UTC 2002


On Tuesday 02 July 2002 03:26 pm, you wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Bill Spears wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Thanks for the very clear explanation. But while trying to do this I ran
> > into Fatal: First Sector of /dev/hda2 doesn't have a valid boot
> > signature. I looked at it with fdisk and it is marked bootable.  What am
> > I missing?
>
> I think it is complaining that there is no bootstrap on the /dev/hda2
> partition yet.  I'm not sure at this point if it went ahead and installed
> the master boot record or not, this may simply be a warning rather than a
> fatal error, since it doesn't really need for there to be a bootstrap on
> the partition in order to install the master boot record.  To be safe, you
> could run lilo with your redhat configuration to initialize the /dev/hda2
> boot record, then re-run lilo with the configuration to initialize the
> drive boot record.  Of course it will probably complain about your Debian
> partition too if that partition has not yet had a boot record written to
> it.
>
> 

You're absolutely right.  Working from RH I ran lilo -C liloRedhat.conf, 
which put ? on hda2, then lilo -C liloDebian.conf which put ? on hda4, then 
lilo -C liloOthers.conf which put ? on hda, and, MY GOD, it all worked.   
Before when I ran lilo -C liloOthers.conf it complained about both hda2 and 
hda4. I mistakenly thought it had somehting to do with making partitions 
active which it doesn't.  Thanks to all for the help. I think I should now 
learn Grub :-)

Now what's wrong with this. I used dd to copy a kernel to a floppy, but when 
I tried to boot from it I got a 'compression' error




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