[linux-help] LILO problems at boot time

[Jim Eberhardt <jeberhardt@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
I recently started having difficulties booting my Linux system. After
compiling a new kernel and rerunning LILO to install it, the system now
hangs during boot. When the system comes up it begins to load LILO, and
then shows the following erroneous message:

LIL-

where the system hangs. I've been able to boot the system off a boot disk,
so I tried rerunning LILO with a kernel I knew worked, which of course
still gave me the same problem.

If I had to guess (with what little I know about hard disks and the boot
process) I would think the MRB is corrupt, but I'm not exactly sure how to
check or repair this. I thought about using 'dd' to write from /dev/zero to
the MRB and then rerunning LILO, but I don't expect that to fix anything.
It appeared to me from the man page that ex2fsck would not be able to check
the MRB, but perhaps I just don't know the proper options to feed it.

For some backround information, I'm running Linux on an IBM Thinkpad with
Slackware 7.1 (kernel 2.2.16). I used to be running Slackware 7.0 (kernel
2.2.13) but recently upgraded my hard disk and installed 2.2.16 on the new
disk (6.4 GB). The system has been running fine until this problem. It may
or may not be relevant but the kernel compilation was an attempt to
activate module support for use with the ALSA sound drivers.

Hopefully I've supplied any information that might be relevant. Does anyone
have any suggestions as to the source and remedy of this problem?

Thanks,
Jim


-- This is the linux-help@xxxxxxxxx list.  To unsubscribe,
visit http://tmp2.complete.org/cgi-bin/listargate-aclug.cgi