Re: hang on boot - more info

[*snicker* <menion mindless com>]

>         It hung, so I booted with the boot floppy, got in as 'rescue' and
>         poked around the file system.
>         First, like you said the /dev stuff is not being mounted, so when I
>         got in I first had to:
>                 mount /dev/hdb6 /mnt
>         Then I tried what you said (making sure there is lilo.conf, with the
>         correct boot=/dev/hdb6 line in it (in my case hdb6 is the /
>         partition.  It is on my second drive, Linux native, and marked as
>         Bootable) and I also made sure there is /boot directory present
>         (it wasn't there, so I symlinked the one from /mnt )
>         After that I tried running lilo:
>                 /mnt/sbin/lilo  (or /mnt/sbin/lilo -C /mnt/etc/lilo.conf)
>         That gave me some "open: /dev/hdb6 no such .. something"
>         So I looked in /dev and realized there are no partitions listed
>         there!  So I symlinked:
>                 ln -s /mnt/dev/hdb6 /dev/hdb6
>         Then I run lilo again, and this time is said this:
>                 Warning: /dev/hdb6 not on the first drive
>                 Adding dos *
>                 Adding linux
>         So I said great, that's it, this part must have somehow been skipped
>         and now things will work.
>         So I tried to reboot and guess what, it hung again the same way.
> 

First of all, you have, in fact changed nothign as far as your boot
goes.  Do not be suprised that it still re acts the exact same way.  One
little tiny problem here, is that... well...  It will never read lilo in
the Partition of the second disk, not, when at boot the system reads the
Boot Sector of the primary disk.

I am not 'god' on this topic, but here is my best advice.  I would
highly recommend getting your dos(tm), or windows 95(tm) disk, bootable
floppy, and boot to it, then do a 'fdisk /mbr'.  This will reset your
master boor record to point to Micro$uck default.  (Dos(tm)/Win use
it).  THen I would mount the Redhat cd under dos, and copy the contents
of the 'dosutils' directory to the hard drive.  This includes autoboot,
among various things.  I would just use that.  It is easy, involves no
lilo, and even updateing the kernel is easy.  

Get into the 'autoboot.bat', and as one of the kernel parameters to pass
put in 'root=/dev/hdb6 read-only', and this will boot whatever kernel it
has for default, (which is easily replaced), with /dev/hdb6 as root, and
mount it read only, as per Unix default.  I use this on a couple of
systems.  One is a 486 that does not support EIDE, and it has a 2 gig
harddrive, so I had to use Easy Disk instead of Lilo. (Well that was my
choice, I have an affinity for screwing things up at least twice before
I get them right *laugh*). 

js

e-mail me if you have any questions.