Re: [PLUG] lilo

[darxus@chaosreigns.com]

On Sun, 21 May 2000, Steven J Pulito wrote:

> I had a windows partition and a linux partion and used lilo to dual boot.
> 
> When I formatted the first partition and reinstalled windows it wiped the
> MBR and lilo.  However the linux partion is still there.  How do I
> reinstall lilo in the MBR?

Incase the other 2 didn't help enough...

Get a rescue disk.  The 1st floppy of an installation set tends to be a
rescue disk.  Both redhat & debian's are.  Or a bootable cdrom.  If you
don't have one, download an image.  
ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/redhat-6.2-ja/i386/images/boot.img
might work.  Under windows you need rawrite to copy the image to a floppy:
ftp://ftp.valinux.com/pub/mirrors/redhat/redhat/redhat-6.2-ja/i386/dosutils/rawrite.exe

So you download those 2 files, put a blank floppy in a drive, run rawrite,
it asks you what image name, you tell it boot.img, it asks you what drive,
you probably tell it "a", it writes the disk, you reboot your box, *read*
the 1st screen when it boots up & do whatever it says to boot to rescue
mode.  Or otherwise find your way to a command prompt.

Now you need to mount your linux partition that has /etc/lilo.conf on
it.  What drive is that ?  What partition ?  If it's your 1st IDE hard
drive's 1st partition, than it's /dev/hda1.  If it's your 1st scsi disk, I
believe it's /dev/scd1.. but you've probably got IDE, right ?  You can
look at your partition tables w/ "fdisk /dev/hda" "fdisk /dev/hdb" etc. --
it'll tell you what key to hit for help.  I think you hit "p" to show you
the list of existing partitions.  Then exit without saving.

Now you know what partition it is.  Say it's /dev/hda1.  You need a mount
point.  Make sure the directory /mnt exists and is empty.  Any empty
directory will do, if you need one, use mkdir, but this is a typical mount
point that is usually available on rescue disks.

Given the above assumptions, mount like so:

 mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

Now if you cd /mnt, you should see the root directory of your linux
partition.  If you 

 cat /mnt/etc/lilo.conf

You should see your lilo.conf scroll by.  If everything's gone well, run:

 lilo -r /mnt

The -r tells it that your root directory is actually mounted in /mnt.  You
should be good.  Reboot your box.  Pray.  Cross your fingers.  Scream
"work" pleadingly at the appropriate time.  Whatever it is you do.  

This really isn't a major problem and is quite recoverable.  

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