Boot problem

[Michael Sammartano]

Hard drive failure! Must be an old drive

Eric "Shubes" wrote:

> I stopped by Joe's this afternoon. The good new is we got his DSL 
> modem working.
>
> There is still a problem booting though. We're not entirely sure how 
> it got to the state it's in, but here's what we observe.
>
> 1) There are two drives (hda, hdb) on the computer. Booting from hda 
> was  not working, so the computer was booting W98/bootmagic from hdb. 
> We disabled hdb in the bios so that wouldn't happen.
>
> 2) Knoppix sees both drives aok, regardless of bios settings. We ran 
> qtparted, changed active partition from hda5 to hda6, committed. No 
> problem (I don't think the active flag really matters to lilo).
>
> 3) His mandriva '/' partition is hda6. We mounted it, chrooted to it, 
> mounted /proc, and ran lilo. All appeared to be ok. lilo.conf 
> parameter boot=hda was specified, so lilo should have updated the MBR 
> on hda.
>
> So far, so good. Now for the weirdness.
>
> In the BIOS setup, auto was selected for hda. When booting, the search 
> for device was successful, and showed the hda model name (hdb no 
> longer showed, as we specified 'none' for it). However, in the BIOS 
> boot summary information, it shows 'none' for primary master (hda)!! 
> I've never seen such a thing. Actually, we noticed this before 
> disabling hdb. With no hdb and no apparent hda, it couldn't find a 
> system disk and froze.
>
> So I guess the question is, how can the bios auto detect the device, 
> yet  not have it listed in the summary? I suspect something in the MBR 
> isn't quite right, but don't know exactly what it could be (and 
> subsequently how to fix it). lilo *should* (appeared to) have 
> rewritten the MBR, and the partition table appeared to be ok, as 
> qtparted updated it. What else is in the MBR that could be causing this?
>
> There is a backup of the original MBR (on hda6) which lilo made on its 
> initial installation. Without knowing what the problem is though, I'm 
> hesitant to restore the MBR from that backup. Should we give that a try?
>
> Joe has several partitions on the drive and has bits and pieces of 
> valuable information on each of them so until he gets that copied off, 
> we don't want to try anything very drastic.
>
> Any ideas are appreciated. We're stumped at this point.


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