Oswald Buddenhagen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: DZM> I've tried reinstalling both LILO and the Debian MBR. Neither DZM> 'install-mbr' nor rerunning 'liloconfig' seems to have had an effect. OB> i don't know, what liloconfig is for, but does it automatically run lilo? OB> the invocation of /sbin/lilo does the actual installation of the OB> boot sector/mbr ...
Actually, it doesn't. (And yes, I have run both LILO and installed the Debian MBR directly; that had no effect.) The default setup is to install LILO on the root partition, rather than in the MBR. A short specialized MBR is installed instead. Just about all of the functionality it has is to offer a choice of partitions to boot from, with a default of the first active partition. It doesn't even have much of an interface; for me, it would display "1FA:" if tweaked. But this turns out not to have been a problem. After messing with things some more and finally creating a floppy with GRUB on it, I discovered that the system would just freeze if I tried to touch the hard drive before a Linux kernel booted. I traced this back to a BIOS setting: my system has a known buggy CMD640 IDE interface, and I had disabled the "write prefetch" option in the BIOS. The system *really* didn't like this, apparently, I re-enabled it and everything is more-or-less happy now. -- David Maze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/ "Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal." -- Abra Mitchell
