Re: Problems installing Redhat 6.0

[Anne POSSOZ <Anne Possoz Epfl Ch>]

> I installed redhat 6.0 on a compaq machine (Xeon 450 mhz, 256 ram, 2 @
> 9.1GB ultra wide scsi). Redhat installs fine but when I reboot,  LILO
> does not boot ... the screen displays 'LI' and it hangs there. I have
> replaced the scsi drives with another paid of brand new drives (all 4
> drives that I tried are brand new). When I partition the drive the
> geometry shows 8600+ cylinders ... could this be causing the problem?
> 
> Incidentially, I had successfully installed redhat 6.0 on the same
> drives about a week ago but I took it apart to reinstall it again ...
> only this time it will not boot.

Where do you put LILO? In the MBR or in the partition?
If you did it once in MBR and now in partition, you better find
a disket with dos fdisk and run the command:
fdisk /mbr

If you install it in partition and already have windows in the
first partition, there is a huge chance that the /etc/lilo.conf
file is badly constructed. When the linux partition is a logical
partition member of an extended one, the first line of
lilo.conf (boot=/dev/xxx) is wrong.
At least with kickstart, this is always wrong (I don't know why 
this bug is still there).
Before rebooting, you can correct that file and reload lilo.
How to do this:
When you get the "Congratulation screen", don't hit <return>
but hit <ALT>F2. There you get a bash prompt.
chroot /mnt (your / is there)
fdisk -l    (to see the partition types of your disk)
modify etc/lilo.conf to put the right line for "boot="
execute lilo

Run also fdisk to make the right partition bootable.

and only now, type <ALT>F1 and hit return.

As an example, here is the lilo.conf file after redhat 6.0 installation
with kickstart:
[root linuxtest2 /tmp]# cat /etc/lilo.conf.DIST.REDHAT 
boot=/dev/sda5
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.5-22
        label=linux
        root=/dev/sda5
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.5-22.img
        read-only
---
and here is the correct file:
[root linuxtest2 /tmp]# cat /etc/lilo.conf             
boot=/dev/sda2
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.5-22
        label=linux
        root=/dev/sda5
        initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.5-22.img
        read-only
other=/dev/sda1
        label=windowsNT
        table=/dev/sda
---
which correspond to:
[root linuxtest2 /tmp]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 527 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1             1       360   2891668+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2           361       527   1341427+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           361       488   1028128+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6           489       521    265041   82  Linux swap

But first try solution with fdisk /mbr which is a very
frequent problem here on our site.
Hope it helps instead of increasing the confusion.
-- 

                    Anne Possoz
                    http://slsun2.epfl.ch/possoz.html
                    Service Informatique Central
                    Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
                    1015 Lausanne (Switzerland)
                    Tel : (41/21) 693.22.49