[lug] LILO and LIes

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2001 at 10:27:57AM -0700, John Starkey wrote:
> > Did you solve your problem or did you give up
> > and installed a real OS like  Win95 ?
> 
> Believe it or not this all started with an attempt to get gnome running
> and set everything up so I can do my work on Linux and get rid of the
> Windoze machine. I work with a company that uses a proprietary code for
> displaying HTML, ASP, JS pages, this code/app is created in partnership w/
> M$. But the biggest problem is that I code a lot of MSWord docs that I
> need to see exactly the way they were intended.
> 
> I was trying to install the XFree86 4 and needed a newer version of
> ld.so. Then glibc2 (which I assumed/hoped contained ld.so) came up with
> some errors in linux and asm header files so I'm doing the kernel now.
> 
> > One thing that crossed my mind: Some stupid, silly
> > boards have virus protectio on their MBR, preventing
> > anything from writing to this part of the disk. 
> > And some of these virus protected boards won't give
> > you an error if you try to write to the MBR.
> > Check your BIOS settings.
> 
> Yes this is one of those silly boards :} But it was/is disabled. 
> 
> What about reinstalling LILO? I don't wanna use rpms. I never have any
> luck with them. I'd feel more comfortable if I just compile it myself for
> now. I'm gonna try to track down the src right now.
> 
> It does seem to me that this is a lilo issue. I spent a few hours
> compiling different variations of the kernel, with/without modules
> enabled, using just the defaults, etc. Then I tried using make install
> instead of copying the images over and running lilo myself.
> 
> But the whole reality as, I think you stated is that lilo says it's got
> the kernel ready to go, but on restart it's not there. 

Somehow i really doubt that this is an LILO issue at all.
Ok, it's pretty easy to check this. Copy the first block
of your harddisk to a save place:

   dd count=1 bs=512 if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/mbr1

Then change the default image in /etc/lilo.conf (switch
the kernel that gets booted) and do:

   dd count=1 bs=512 if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/mbr2

Now, do an md5 check on both files:

 tmp# md5sum  mbr*
 0b057d026837906b1edd9595bae06e5a  mbr1
 4decbece7185b000b41d6a1c71bcd2f0  mbr2

If both checksums are the same then LILO wasn't able
to change your MBR.


Well, we'll see ;-)

 Ralf