[PLUG] Software problem or bad motherboard?

[alan]

On Sun, 5 Mar 2006, plug_0 at robinson-west.com wrote:

> 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.

If you are using a distro that does SELinux, you will screw up the 
security contexts doing that. I don't believe Slack uses SELinux extended 
attributes.

There is a recovery disc for Fedora Core that works and does not muck up 
SELinux.

-- 
"George W. Bush -- Bringing back the Sixties one Nixon at a time."