[wellylug] Bootloader Problems?

[Phillip Rose]

At 08:28 17/04/04 +1200, Jethro wrote:

>I've just got a pentium pro, 200mhz. I've installed linux on it, but
>when it starts to boot from the hard disk it says: 'invalid os'.

What distro did you install? Did you make a boot floppy, and can you boot
from that? I suggest making a boot floppy if you haven't, and trying to
boot from that. If you can boot from the floppy, then it's probably a
matter of setting the appropriate partition as bootable.

>I've setup grub as the bootloader. Could it be that? I was able to boot
>a morphix cdrom okay, so maybe I should try lilo instaid...

Live CDs boot from your CDROM, not from a boot loader on your HD. GRUB or
lilo... that shouldn't matter. I recently had a similar problem installing
MEPIS, another Debian-based distro. (I like it a lot, BTW.) It had trouble
knowing which partition was my boot partition, since I'd left several Linux
partitions on the disk from a prior RH install, including a partition
confusingly labelled "/boot". I thought MEPIS would wipe those partitions,
but it didn't. Anyway, it would boot from the floppy but not the HD.

I set it straight by using cfdisk (fdisk would have been OK), and setting
the "root" partition (the one that contains the real boot files) as
bootable, using the "b" option.

Here's an excerpt from my lilo.conf. Note that the boot line just tells
lilo which disk to look on (hda), then the appropriate image stanza says
where "root" is:
==
boot=/dev/hda
timeout=150
prompt
default=linux
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.22
  vga=791
  label=linux
  append="nomce hdc=ide-scsi "
  root=/dev/hda11
other=/dev/hda1
  label=MSWinhda1
  table=/dev/hda
==
Here's some of my now defunct RH /boot/grub.conf, aka menu.1st:
==
# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE:  You have a /boot partition.  This means that
#          all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
#          root (hd0,1)
#          kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda11
#          initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=0
#default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,1)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
password --md5 @%@$%$@%@%@$$@%$@%$@%$@^%^%
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.20-28.9)
        root (hd0,1)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-28.9 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
        initrd /initrd-2.4.20-28.9.img
title DOS
        rootnoverify (hd0,0)
        chainloader +1
==

Here's the output of "fdisk -l", showing my bootable Linux and Windows
partitions (with an "*"), plus a bunch of now unused Linux partitions.
MEPIS used hda11 for all its files, so it's the one that contains the /boot
directory, and is the one I had to manually set as bootable using cfdisk.:
==
root at 0[phillip]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1         383     3076416    b  W95 FAT32
/dev/hda2             384         407      192780   83  Linux
/dev/hda3             408         529      979965   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4             530       14593   112969080    5  Extended
/dev/hda5             530        2961    19535039+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda6            4178        7824    29294496   83  Linux
/dev/hda7            7825        7885      489951   83  Linux
/dev/hda8           12755       14593    14771736   83  Linux
/dev/hda9            2962        4177     9767488+  83  Linux
/dev/hda10           7886        7893       64228+  83  Linux
/dev/hda11  *        7894       12754    39045951   83  Linux

Partition table entries are not in disk order
==
HTH,
--Phillip