Boot problem

[Kenneth]

I don't think you can hurt anything restoring the original MBR if the drive
won't boot the way it is.

How about switching the drives and installing lilo on the other drive? I have
never seen symptoms like you describe. I'm not sure what else to try.  I've
seen strange things if drives weren't jumpered correctly, but if these two
drives were working together previously that wouldn't seem to be an issue.

--- "Eric \"Shubes\"" <plug at shubes.net> 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.
> -- 
> -Eric 'shubes'
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