John K. Herreshoff wrote:

.... what seems like a rather complicated way to get around booting the
installation disk with "root=/dev/foo1" (for appropriate values of
"foo", of course) as an argument to the boot process ... In reality it
isn't as complicated as it seems in writing, but why not just boot with
"root=/dev/foo1"? That's a lot easier.

> And as these others are saying or hinting at, you will need to run
> lilo in a chroot jail... which I just did by running chroot
> /mnt/root.

You could have saved that trouble by using options to lilo:

-C config-file
-r root-directory

Both clearly documented in the lilo manual page ...

> Heh! If you are on just one partition, that will make things easy for
> you.

If you want easy, boot the installation disk with "root=/dev/...1"

--
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Sylvain Robitaille syl@alcor.concordia.ca

Systems and Network analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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Sylvain Robitaille wrote:

> John K. Herreshoff wrote:
>
> ... what seems like a rather complicated way to get around booting the
> installation disk with "root=/dev/foo1" (for appropriate values of
> "foo", of course) as an argument to the boot process ... In reality it
> isn't as complicated as it seems in writing, but why not just boot with
> "root=/dev/foo1"? That's a lot easier.
>
>> And as these others are saying or hinting at, you will need to run
>> lilo in a chroot jail... which I just did by running chroot
>> /mnt/root.
>
> You could have saved that trouble by using options to lilo:
>
> -C config-file
> -r root-directory
>
> Both clearly documented in the lilo manual page ...
>
>> Heh! If you are on just one partition, that will make things easy for
>> you.
>
> If you want easy, boot the installation disk with "root=/dev/...1"
>

I tried that with Lilo, and it did not like it, so I did the chroot thing,
which, given my setup of multiple partitions, would be the way to do it.

John.

John K. Herreshoff wrote:

>> If you want easy, boot the installation disk with "root=/dev/...1"
>
> I tried that with Lilo, and it did not like it, ...

What errors did you see? In particular, keep in mind that I'm
recommending this be done with the Slackware installation boot disk,
not an installed (or customized) kernel. I have done this more times
than I care to admit to, but have never had trouble with it when I do.

Note that if the root filesystem (or more importantly, /etc/fstab) is
corrupted or incorrect, this approach will have problems, but I find it
hard to imagine any other conditions where it would. I don't believe
the OP suggested there is anything wrong with the filesystem itself or
his fstab file.

> so I did the chroot thing, which, given my setup of multiple
> partitions, would be the way to do it.

Do what works, but I certainly don't agree that what you've described
"would be the way to do it". It's error-prone, as it relies too much on
human memory, which is itself not particularly reliable, or at least not
as reliable as a file stored on disk. As with most things, there's more
than one way to do it. I think I've recommended _the_ easiest solution.

--
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Sylvain Robitaille syl@alcor.concordia.ca

Systems and Network analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sylvain Robitaille wrote:

> John K. Herreshoff wrote:
>
>>> If you want easy, boot the installation disk with "root=/dev/...1"
>>
>> I tried that with Lilo, and it did not like it, ...
>
> What errors did you see? In particular, keep in mind that I'm
> recommending this be done with the Slackware installation boot disk,
> not an installed (or customized) kernel. I have done this more times
> than I care to admit to, but have never had trouble with it when I do.
>
> Note that if the root filesystem (or more importantly, /etc/fstab) is
> corrupted or incorrect, this approach will have problems, but I find it
> hard to imagine any other conditions where it would. I don't believe
> the OP suggested there is anything wrong with the filesystem itself or
> his fstab file.
>
>> so I did the chroot thing, which, given my setup of multip.le
>> partitions, would be the way to do it.
>
> Do what works, but I certainly don't agree that what you've described
> "would be the way to do it". It's error-prone, as it relies too much on
> human memory, which is itself not particularly reliable, or at least not
> as reliable as a file stored on disk. As with most things, there's more
> than one way to do it. I think I've recommended _the_ easiest solution.
>

Cool. Please spell it out step by step for the guy who cannot start his
box.

John

Everybody seems to be helping for how to run lilo in some particular
situation, but the actual reason of my post is that my slack is
hanging at the "BIOS data check" point after i changed something in
the BIOS and someone came saying that lilo is concerned. OK
i'm advised to put in the lilo.conf "vga=ask" by that person.

plpease anyone can tell me what the vga has to do with the boot
devices order, because that's what i changed in the BIOS.

I personally don't think that's the problem;
initialy everything was working well.
I think the BIOS data doesn't not comply anymore with what was
previously recorded in the init files.

thanks for your help but be also focused on that initial topic.

heavytull wrote:
> My slackware 11 is hanging at the point "BIOS data ckeck" just after
> booting it via lilo.
>
> It is hapening like that since i changed the booting devices order in
> the BIOS;

And that seems to have changed the mapping of BIOS drive numbers to
physical drives. Because lilo uses BIOS calls to access the boot drive
this makes that lilo tries to access the wrong drive.

You'll probaly be able to correct this by booting from a emergency CD
and run lilo again as others explained, but I'm not sure about that.

If your boot drive is a serial ata disk it will be seen by the
kernel a /dev/sdx just like an usb drive will be seen. I'm wondering if
this change in booting order also results in a change of drive order
as seen by the kernel (probably depending on the presence of the
usb disk during the boot). You might need to change /etc/fstab and
/etc/lilo.conf if the drive numbering changed. And if the drive
assignment depends on the presence of the usb drive I suggest to use
disk labels in /etc/lilo.conf and /etc/fstab instead of partition
names like /dev/sda1

>
> i just shifted the boot on USD HDD from 5th or farther to third just
> before the main hardware on which there is the linux partition and
> windows.
>
> also note that however is my usb key (plugged in or not) Linux is
> hanging.
>

Regards,

Kees.

heavytull wrote:


>
> plpease anyone can tell me what the vga has to do with the boot
> devices order, because that's what i changed in the BIOS.
>

if vga=ask or vga=normal you may get a bit more screen printout before your
machine dies

I've had a machine die at this spot for a lot of reasons: mainly that some
important part of the system was not in the kernel but in a module that had
not yet been loaded at boot time. In my system, if the framebuffer,
filesystem, or scsi low level driver is not compiled into my kernel, I get
the same crash and burn that you have now.

Have you reordered your drives? If that has happened without making changes
to lilo.conf and then running lilo, you will not start because lilo will be
looking in the wrong place for /boot.

Can you reset the bios to the way it was before you had trouble?

John.

heavytull (heavytull@hotmail.com) writes:
> Everybody seems to be helping for how to run lilo in some particular
> situation, but the actual reason of my post is that my slack is
> hanging at the "BIOS data check" point after i changed something in
> the BIOS and someone came saying that lilo is concerned. OK
> i'm advised to put in the lilo.conf "vga=ask" by that person.
>
> plpease anyone can tell me what the vga has to do with the boot
> devices order, because that's what i changed in the BIOS.

At the very least, it becomes a marker. YOu say it "hangs" which
suggests you sit there with a blank screen, waiting forever.

If you set it so it asks aboug vga, then if the prompt appears
you know the point at which it gets to.

This is no different from writing programs, and putting in a lot of
prints of some sort so you know at which point things stop working.

I don't even know what "BIOS data check" means. The bios runs
things and then hands things off to the boot on whatever device
it is booting from. And so if you set the BIOS to boot first
from the CDROM, then it will try to boot from the CDROM, and if
there's nothing to boot from there, it will try the next device,
say the hard drive, and if it can't boot from there, it will try
the next device, say the floppy drive.

So you get into the BIOS setting, and change it back to what it
was. Nothing you fiddle with in there should affect the booting
of LInux, unless you fiddled with the booting drive so it no
longer sees something that is bootable.

Unless you've fiddled with Linux itself, then the issue is
in the booting, and at some point the BIOS handles it, and then
eventually it hands it off to something you've set up.

Michael

John K. Herreshoff wrote:

> Please spell it out step by step for the guy who cannot start his box.

Please see Message-ID: <slrnf2pgce.3lkm.syl@alcor.concordia.ca>, in
which I believe I did exactly that.

--
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Sylvain Robitaille syl@alcor.concordia.ca

Systems and Network analyst Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology Montreal, Quebec, Canada
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sylvain Robitaille wrote:

> John K. Herreshoff wrote:
>
>> Please spell it out step by step for the guy who cannot start his box.
>
> Please see Message-ID: <slrnf2pgce.3lkm.syl@alcor.concordia.ca>, in
> which I believe I did exactly that.
>

Pretend that the readers are 8 years old.

Make it simple.

John.