Maybe a hardware fault happened, in this case unfortunately at the same time as a rewrite of the lilo boot information. I was just about to file a bug report... Still there are some open issues remaining.
Russell Coker writes: > On Tue, 3 Sep 2002 08:44, Svante Signell wrote: > > After upgrade of lilo in unstable my whole SCSI disk got trashed. It > > could only be recovered with the use of the IBM drive fitness test > > tool, and a complete erase disk was necessary :-( What happened? > > If you need to run an IBM diagnostics program to get your disk working then > it's a hardware issue and nothing to do with LILO. > > LILO like all Linux programs does not get to talk to the hardware directly and > only gets to write data to the block device (/dev/sda or /dev/sda1). If > writing to such a device can require special IBM utilities to recover then > it's a hardware or device driver issue (but most likely hardware). > > > A reinstall of Woody showed that it can only boot from the MBR > > partition, not the root partition, i.e. > > > > boot=/dev/sda, works! > > boot=/dev/sda1, does not work! > > Strange, /dev/hda1 in the form of /dev/md1 works for me. As seen from the original posting, the boot sector information was boot=/dev/sda1 root=/dev/sda1 and it did work before, but not after the crash. Explanation? When running lilo before and after the same information is displayed: Reading boot sector from /dev/sda1 After the crash (with 22.3.3-2): Reading boot sector from /dev/sda Using MENU secondary loader Calling map_insert_data Can someone explain (or give a pointer to) the different behaviour of writing to the MBR vs the root partition? > > > What has changed for newer versions of lilo? I have been running > > Debian stable/testing/unstable for several years now without any > > problems before. > > 22.3 was one of the biggest changes to LILO in recent times that did have > potential to cause breakage. The versions after that were minor changes. The version upgrade was from 22.3.2-1 to 22.3.2-3. The main difference is the removal of the /boot/boot.b link. > > Note also that I have a dual disk system, SCSI and IDE, therefore the > > disk=, bios= statements in lilo.conf. The disk partitioning tools, such as > > cfdisk requires both the SCSI disk and the IDE disk to have at least > > one partition with the boot flag set. Is this really necessary? > > No. You don't really need any boot flags to be set. Then why can't I write the partiton table in cfdisk without setting the boot flag on one of the partitions of the IDE disk? > > > Does the install=menu stuff have anything to do with the crash? > > No. It's the default action anyway... > > > Maybe grub is better with respect to error recovery? > > If your hardware fails to badly that Linux programs can't fix it then grub vs > LILO is not an issue. > > > Russell Coker > > > PS Let's move this to debian-user. OK -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
