I need to fix Lilo

[Dapper Dan 0]

Danleff, this is mainly for you since you are the Lilo Guru around here.. but I welcome anyone elses input as well.

 

I've had a hell of a time configuring my new Netgear Ma311 wireless PCI under Mandrake 10 Community, but Morphix found and configured my Orinoco gold card on our Toshiba laptop without cracking a terminal. My thought was, since Knoppix/Morphix finds and configures the prism 2/orinoco type cards so well, which both are, I'll just install Morphix on the box that had Mandrake 10 and try to configure it that way.

 

When I installed Mdk 10, I installed Lilo to the MBR. When I installed Morphix, I again attempted to install Lilo to the MBR. I'm now getting Lilo coming up, but with the Mandrake splash screen and shortly after that, I'm getting kernel panic. It seems evident that Morphix did not install Lilo to the MBR over the Mandrake version which is ok with me, although I want Morphix to boot.

 

I can use the Morphix live CD to edit the files on the hard drive, but I'm unsure of how to do it.

 

What do I need to do to edit the lilo.conf on the HD to boot Morphix? Would it be the file at /etc/lilo.conf?

 

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[danleff 0]

Well, not knowing much about Morphix....I've only done this with a rescue disk, which automates the process somewhat.

 

Assuming that Mandrake is gone, try using the live cd boot. How you edit lilo (if the live cd allows the edit, as some distros have lilo protected as root) depends if lilo is protected as root or user permissions.

 

Yes, /etc/lilo is the file. Look at that file and make sure that it is indeed there. If so, make sure that at the beginning of lilo, the lines something like

 

lba32

boot=/dev/hda (assuming that hda is the mbr location)

 

The key is the boot=/dev/hda, which signifies installing lilo on the mbr. If it is not installed on the mbr, it will say something different, say if lilo was installed on a boot partition other than the mbr. Edit this if necessary and save the changes. If Morphix Live cd does not auto mount the partition that it is installed on, then at a console, issue the following commands;

 

mount -t ext3 /dev/hdxx /mnt (xx= the partition where Morphix is installed on. If you have not been able to modify lilo, try it after issuing the next command)

 

chroot /mnt

 

/sbin/lilo

 

Just make sure that you look at and modify, if needed, the lilo file to see if the boot= line is correct, before running the /sbin/lilo command.

 

Lilo, unlike Grub, needs this last command to actually write the information on the mbr.

 

[Dapper Dan 0]

Yes, you can mount the HD from the Morphix live cd. I will give this a try today. Thanks!