[PLUG] Software problem or bad motherboard?

[plug_0 at robinson-west.com]

Quoting eehouse <eehouse at eehouse.org>:

> > LILO problem.  Need to either have a small /boot partition at the
> > start of the drive, or use grub instead.
> 
> Forget my previous reply/question: you're entirely right.  The "boot
> floppy" and "bootable CD-ROM" I was trying with don't boot any other
> machine either, lables notwithstanding.  Once I'd made a floppy that
> could boot a working machine it booted the broken one as well.  It was
> an ancient debian rescue disk, on a 2.2 kernel, but with it I was able
> to run grub-install, reboot to "L 07 07 07" again, boot off the floppy
> and run grub-install again, and finally boot off of the hard drive.
> As far as I can tell, the machine's back to working.  No motherboard
> problems here.
> 
> lilo is not on the machine.  I don't understand how it got involved in
> the boot process.  But I'm happy now, and can worry about that some
> other time. :-)
> 
> Thanks very much for your help this Saturday evening!
> 
> --Eric

Having a Slackware install CD is another good way to do rescues.  The way 
Slackware installs, you start in a working Linux environment which happens
to be incredibly useful for fixing things.  Anymore, I'm moving towards
freedos and loadlin to get into Linux.  This is a nice clean way, especially
if Winhose is installed anywhere, to avoid the boot sector nightmere.
One problem I've run into is wanting to run parallel Linux systems on the
same machine so that there is a main and a backup system.  Even adding a
blank hard disk can mess up grub.  If PC's supported an off hard disk 
boot sector, this could significantly alleviate this issue.  If you can
boot to thumb drive before hard disk, this is something I'd recommend 
exploring.

Michael C. Robinson

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