[lug] LILO Boot Problem

[Steve Mathias]

Hello Everyone,

I recently installed a new version of Linux (Mandrake 7.2 dist.) over an
existing RH5.2 system.  The fact that I'm posting this from work should be
some indication that it did not go so well.  Everything seemed to go fine
(except for creating the boot floppy, but I hadn't been able to mount a floppy
for sometime, so that didn't surprise me), until rebooting after the install.
At that point my machine hung at the point where one normally sees LILO ....
I only saw LI followed by a flashing cursor.

Since then I have completely reformatted both my hard drives - I have a SCSI
disk and an IDE disk - using fdisk or the graphical tools provided by the
installers.  I've tried reinstalling RH version 5.2, 6.1 on the IDE drive, as
the RH installer doesn't even seem to recognize that the SCSI disk is there.
The Mandrake installer seems to recognizes both disks, and I've tried
installing onto both of them.  In all cases, the system hangs when rebooting,
at the same place.  In a desperate attempt to get my machine to boot at any
cost, I even tried to install NT and this produced the same result.

At this point I have the Mandrake distribution installed on the IDE drive.  I
can only boot the machine from the install CD.  If I do a rescue at the
install prompt, I can get a prompt.  If I do 'fdisk /dev/sda' it says that it
can't see the disk.  This leads me to believe that there is some problem with
the partition table on that disk, that it's not really re-formatted and that
there is a bootloader on there which the system is trying to use.  But I'm in
way over my head here.  I would really appreciate any advice or pointers on
how I can try to sort this out.

Thanks.

    -Steve

-- 

Steve Mathias
mathias at genomica.com