I am having problems getting my new install of Red Hat 7.2 to boot
from the hard drive. I performed a pretty basic install and everything
appeared to go well. The system will only boot from the boot floppy
however. I have three drives in the system. The boot drive is an 8.4
GB IDE drive on the primary IDE channel as hda. The other two are
newer ATA/100 drives on the IDE1 channel of a Promise/Maxtor
controller card. These are set up as hde and hdf.
When booting from the hard drive, the floppy light comes on, and I
see a blinking underscore character in the upper left corner of the
screen. The system becomes totally unresponsive at this point.
Even when placing a boot floppy in the drive. After running lilo and
grub-install numerous times, I started to think the the master boot
sector was not being written at all. With each attempt to write a
new MBR, the results were exactly the same - only the blinking
underscore.
Just for the hell of it, I booted with a Win95 boot disk and run fdisk
/mbr to write a new boot sector. After doing that I am now getting
the standard "Operating system is missing" error that
DOS/Windows displays when it cannot find a Win partition. I now
know that a new MBR had been written. Each time I have run either
lilo or grub-install, I still get the same message that appeared after
using the Windows boot disk to write the MBR.
I am thinking that neither lilo nor grub is able to write the MBR for
some reason. Would anyone know why? Following is my lilo.conf,
grub.conf, and fstab files. I wouldn't think it would matter, but
previous to this install, I had the drive that is now supposed to be
my boot disk set up as a master drive on a secondary IDE channel
with lilo placed on the beginng of the drive instead of on the MBR (I
used a different drive as my primary with the NT bootloader to
either load NT or lilo --> linux ).
Like an idiot, I upgraded the kernel with the rpm found on the Red
Hat Updates site before getting this boot problem fixed. Now when
booting with the boot disk I get a bunch of errors because the
modules for the old kernel are not on the HDD.
If anyone can figure out what is going on, I could really use a hand.
Thanks
Mike Glaser
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lilo.conf
=========================
timeout=10
default=linux
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
message=/boot/message
linear
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.9-7
label=linux
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.4.9-7.img
read-only
root=/dev/hda2
=========================
=========================
/etc/fstab
=========================
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
LABEL=/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/max1 /max1 ext3 defaults 1 2
LABEL=/max2 /max2 ext3 defaults 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660
noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner,kudzu
0 0
=========================
=========================
/boot/grub/grub.conf
=========================
# 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 (hd0,0)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda2
# initrd /initrd-version.img
# boot=/dev/hda
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
password --md5 xxxxxx
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.9-7)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.9-7 ro root=/dev/hda2
initrd /initrd-2.4.9-7.img
=========================