[techtalk] installation failure

[BobTFish]

At 16:43 18/05/00, Deepa Karnad wrote:
>Hi.
>I found myself trying to make sense of a queer problem today. I am 
>installing Caldera OpenLinux Lite on 3 machines. Installation into 2 of 
>them went fine. Infact it happened like clockwork. Now, on this 3rd 
>machine, it installs completely and reboots perfectly the first time after 
>install. The next time I boot/reboot it, Linux just disappears from the 
>machine and it boots into dos as if the installation was never done.

Oops.

>I use fdisk to partition. It was fine in the last two cases. I did not 
>want to risk though. Which is why, I repartitioned again and installed. 
>And then I had to do it again. But to no avail. The problem is recurring.
>Has anybody faced similar problems? Or can somebody think of what could be 
>doing it?  How can the machine develop amnesia just like that??
>By the way, this is my first experience with installing an OS (and 
>partitioning too).
<snip>

Ok.. Lets do just a little theory then you can understand what you need to 
do to sort your machine out.

When you turn the machine on the CPU jumps to a certain address in memory. 
The BIOS chip lives at this address and so starts executing (not 100% true 
but will do for now). The BIOS finds all your hard discs and then loads the 
first sector of the boot drive (usually the first drive) this secor 
contains the master boot record (MBR)

The bios then jumps to the MBR giving it control. The MBR then loads 
another loader in the boot sector of the boot partition (In your case DOS) 
- This second boot sector then either loads another loader which knows 
something about the filing system and loads the OS..

When you install linux you usually install a program called lilo. You can 
install lilo either on the MBR or in a partition's boot sector.. Lilo knows 
about all your OSen and gives you a choice - For linux it loads the kernel 
directly and for other OSes it loads their partition boot sector.

Your problem seems to be that you have installed lilo not on the MBR but on 
your linux partition's boot sector and the MBR isn't booting that partition.

What you need to do is to go into DOS, start fdisk and mark the linux 
partition as bootable and un-mark the DOS partition as bootable.. This will 
mean lilo gets executed and you can choose :)

(The bootable flag has nothing to do with if an OS is on that partition, 
just where the master boot record should go to...)


Hope this is clear (ish) and helps

BobTFish