Re: No longer able to boot from SCSI disk

[ABrady <kcsmart kc rr com>]

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 16:06:12 -0700 Vladimir G Ivanovic <vladimir acm org>
spit forth:

> I don't know what I did, but I'm not longer able to boot from my only
> SCSI disk, /dev/sda.
> 
> I've grepped through the recent seawolf list archives, and although one
> person reported a similar problem, I didn't see that a solution I could
> use was posted. 
> 
> When I boot, I get simply an "L" and nothing else; no error codes. Right
> now I'm booting off a floppy, and everything seems to work fine.
> 
> When I run `lilo', I get a "Warning: /dev/sda is not on the first disk"
> even though /dev/sda is the only mounted disk. (I mount in /etc/fstab an
> IDE disk, /dev/hda1, but my BIOS is not set to autodetect any IDE hard
> drives, although PCI IDE support is enabled. When I run `lilo',
> /dev/hda1 is not mounted.) What disk does `lilo' think is the first
> disk, or how can I find out what disk it thinks is the first?
> 
> The maddening thing is that this used to work and something I've changed
> has made it stop.
> 
> Any help would be gratefully accepted. 

When you run lilo (while IN linux, of course) /dev/hda? is mounted. It
wants to write to there, not /dev/sda because /dev/hda is always seen by
lilo as the first drive.

Sorry I can't help with how to get it working as it was, but I can offer a
way to make it work. Set the BIOS back up to detect IDE drives. Then use
mkinitrd to make an initial ramdisk (man mkinitrd), fix lilo.conf to write
to /dev/hda, add the initrd line to lilo.conf, run lilo and reboot. That
way the initial ramdisk will make SCSI modules available for lilo and
allow it to boot from /dev/hda, on which it only needs to see the mbr, not
a bootable partition.

I always used such methodology when I was using an Adaptec 1505 and 1510,
neither of which autodetects, and both of which worked fine with the
procedure outlined above.

-- 
Those who can't write, write manuals.