thelinuxlink.net

Hi everyone,

I have a bit of a tech question - I know there are other forums out there, but I haven't been able to find the answer to my question elsewhere - hence this post.

Today I bit the bullit and had a go at installing slackware 10.2 on a spare machine. Until today I had only ever had experience of using RedHat, and so things were definately different.

The only problem that I seem to have at the moment is that my machine refuses to boot from the hard drive /dev/hda1 is my root partition with hda2 being the swap space.

When I boot from CD and type in the command suggested for when you are 'in a pinch' then I can get the thing to boot - in fact I am writing this post using it right now.

Any advice that you might have would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help.

-Gordon.

Boot from the cd and mount your root partition. Check the file /etc/lilo.conf and make sure it is configured properly. For instance, you should have this at the top:

boot = /dev/hda

Down in your image sections you should see that your root partition is labeled properly, something like:

root = /dev/hda2

(that is if swap is hda1).

If you make changes, then do a chroot to change root to your slackware system:

chroot (mount point)

where mountpoint is where you mounted the slackware root parition. So if you mounted it at /mnt/slack then:

chroot /mnt/slack

issue the lilo command to refresh the boot loader.


When you say it will not boot I take it that lilo is not finding the kernel or that lilo is not loading at all.

dann wrote:...
If you make changes, then do a chroot to change root to your slackware system:

chroot (mount point)

where mountpoint is where you mounted the slackware root parition. So if you mounted it at /mnt/slack then:

chroot /mnt/slack

issue the lilo command to refresh the boot loader.


When you say it will not boot I take it that lilo is not finding the kernel or that lilo is not loading at all.

;heh... wish i'd understood this process about two months ago when i was reinstalling slack because of misconfigurations!

;i had first used chroot while installing gentoo, but i only intuited what it meant, i didn't understand what it could be used for... absolutely brilliant. another way that the unix model buries MS.

;treehead

Hi,

Thanks for the responses - the box is at work, so I'll have a bash with it when I get there in the morning.

I'll be sure to let you know how I get on.

In response to the question about it not booting - it starts to boot in that the machine starts up, something happens with PXE and a dhcp client attempts to get an address (but I think this might be a bios type feature on the network adaptor, I'm not too sure) but when it comes to loading the o/s I get the 'system disk missing or invalid' message.

However if I boot from the slackware cd, I get the lilo prompt and I can then enter the suggested command which gets me into my build - I can be sure because the root user asks for a password which it doesn't from the kernel on the CD.

Anyway - thanks again for the advice. I hope that everything works as expected!

My initial feeling is that slackware is a lot more 'hardcore' than redhat - everything seems to be a bit more tricky, and all the config files are in different places to redhat! Oh well, it's all good fun and excercises the brain too!

Thanks again,

-Gordon

Yeah, redhat follows the sysvinit style of boot scripts where slackware is closer to bsd. Once you get some learning under your belt it becomes a snap and you'll be able to figure out most any linux distro.

That's got it!!!

Thanks Dann - my machine now boots like a dream.

I had to create the /mnt/slack directory and mount /dev/hda1 to it, then I did the chroot like you said, as well as editing the lilo.conf, and it all works like a dream now!

Thanks again.

-Gordon.