Hi Folks, I'm hoping the collective wisdom of this list can point me at the right TFM. I'm also somewhat inclined to vent.
The problem - I tried to upgrade an elderly system from woody to sarge. Now it doesn't boot. I suspect the upgrade ate the master boot record - but I don't even know the right terminology to figure out what to search for, to try to confirm my suspicions. The behavior - hangs during boot, almost immediately after noting the absence of a bootable CD. It prints 2 characters before the hang: LI. My suspicion - LI stands for LILO, and the "upgrade" disagreed with whatever I *had* been using (LILO)? wanted me on something else (GRUB?) and proceeded to make a mixed muddle that won't boot. What I don't know - how many different systems are available to manage what-one-boots from in debian/linux, what they are called, what the generic term might be (so as to search for the above information), how to recover from this having been trashed (obviously start by booting from CD or floppy, but then what?), and which one is likely to give me the least trouble. Venting now - guess why I switched from red hat to debian? Yep, it was the absence of upgrades making my system unbootable. I figured I was better off with Debian's near inability to get X configurations right - and the upgrade trashed *that* again too - then with Red Hat's habit of making my system only semi-bootable after every kernel upgrade. I realize woody is throughly obsolete, but damn it, I'm trying to get *off* it. Final post script - this really looks like a hardware problem, and I know systems sometimes develop issues that don't show until they are rebooted (or power cycled). That's one reason I rebooted the system once while it was still on woody. Since I encountered no problems then, it's pretty clear the upgrade *is* the culprit, in spite of appearances. -- Arlie (Arlie Stephens [EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]