[Nottingham] Debian lilo problems

[Tony Leake]

I have now got this working, thanks for the suggestions. I checked the bios, 
as Derek suggested and I do have anti-virus protection but it wasn't turned 
on.

Next I installled a minimal mandrake over debian and it's lilo worked fine, 
also picking up my original mandrake from the other hard drive.

I then re-installed debian and for whatever reason it didn't overwrite lilo 
that mandrake had installed ??
So after disconnecting the debian drive and using a mandrake rescue disk I 
finally got my original bootloader reinstalled and got it to boot debian 
too. So everything works for now, thanks for the help, I'm just sweating a 
little that if I like debian and decide to trash mandrake altogether (which 
is the original plan) I may have all of this agin in a few months ;(

Oh yeah, the reason my original debian boot cd was failing... It helps if 
you have boot from floppy turned on in the bios ;)

tony

>I remember getting this problem when I first tried
>installing  red hat 5/6 (long time ago). At the time I
>think it was a corrupt MBR, you can't normally boot
>past the 2GB limit of a HD anyway so the bootable
>partition needs to be within that.
>
>I'd take a disk out and try and get it working with a
>single disk then add the second and manually configure
>lilo/grub to boot the original distro (if you can
>remember the settings).
>
>I just love the debian installer ;) damn hard to get
>it to install, but once on it's great.
>
>If you still have no joy try another distro just to
>make sure it is debian and not a knacked HD.
>
>Which debian version are you trying to install? 3.0,
>3.1 or earlier?
>
>James D
>kingdomlands.com
>
>
>--- Tony Leake <tony_leake@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have just installed Debian for the first time and
> > have some problems with
> > lilo.
> >
> > Apologies in advance if this turns into a long post
> > but there's a lot of
> > 'relevant' information
> >
> > The machine has run Mandrake for a long time but I
> > wanted to try other
> > distros so I added a new slave disk (hdd) and
> > installed Suse. Suse installed
> > grub, I think on the mbr of hdd as when I booted I
> > got a Suse prompt, if I
> > selected 'other linux' I then got my normal Mandrake
> > lilo prompt.
> >
> > Next I decided to trash Suse and install Debian. I
> > was given the option of
> > where to install lilo and I selected hdd. When I
> > rebooted I got a screen
> > full of 01 01 01 etc, same from the boot disk. I
> > re-installed Debian, this
> > time selecting hda for the boot loader, made another
> > boot disk, same result,
> > 01 01 01.
> >
> > I rebooted using rescue and completed the
> > installation and can reboot at any
> > time using rescue but no lilo.
> >
> > I have also tried running mandrake's rescue disk and
> > re-installing it's
> > bootloader, changing the bios to boot from hard
> > drive 1 instead of hard
> > drive 0 but still the same result.
> >
> > I don't know if it's relevant but the mother board
> > is a MSI KM2M combo-L
> > running a 2.4 gig Athlon and both drives are Western
> > Digital Caviar 20gb .
> >
> > After searching google I believe it may be something
> > to do with where the
> > boot loader is installed but I coudn't find and
> > concrete help.
> >
> > Thanks for any ideas.
> > Tony
> >
> >
>_________________________________________________________________
> > Sign-up for a FREE BT Broadband connection today!
> > http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/btbroadband
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Nottingham mailing list
> > Nottingham@mailman.lug.org.uk
> >
>http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/nottingham
>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Calendar - Free online calendar with sync to Outlook(TM).
>http://calendar.yahoo.com
>
>_______________________________________________
>Nottingham mailing list
>Nottingham@mailman.lug.org.uk
>http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/nottingham

_________________________________________________________________
Use MSN Messenger to send music and pics to your friends 
http://www.msn.co.uk/messenger