Last week I went through a woody -> sarge upgrade myself and got the
original problem reported here: the system booted to "LI" then stopped.
I went in with tomsrtbt (this system is headless AND has no CDROM, so I
can only boot off of a floppy and I have to tote around a monitor and
keyboard to plug into it... ugh!) and found the problem. Maybe this
will help someone fix the issue, since it seems too me there are LOTS of
reports of booting only to "LI" then hanging out there on the 'net:
This is what I found: in my /boot directory I had a symlink boot.b which
pointed to boot-menu.b... but that file does not exist:
# ls -al /boot/boot*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 Mar 22 2003 /boot/boot.0300
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Mar 22 2003 /boot/boot.b -> boot-menu.b
This was the cause of all my problems; apparently LILO was being
invoked, couldn't find the MBR file (I think that's what this is), and
somehow trashed my boot. I don't understand why LILO broke my system
when the file clearly doesn't exist, or why my upgrade succeeded with no
errors if LILO failed. I didn't even notice any problems with my system
until I tried to reboot it a week or so after I did the upgrade.
I also don't know where the file "boot-menu.b" came from or why I have a
symlink to it (I don't remember doing that myself but maybe I did: it's
been years since I messed with that box). I suppose whatever package it
was in got removed, but the symlink was not "fixed".
Anyway, once I fixed the symlink and worked out how to run LILO from
tomsrtbt (they use an old kernel so I couldn't chroot until I set an
environment variable to convince GLIBC to use the old kernel syscall
interface), my system came up OK again.
Hopefully this will help tracking down the problems.
--
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Paul D. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> HASMAT: HA Software Mthds & Tools
"Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
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These are my opinions--Nortel takes no responsibility for them.
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