[techtalk] A Very Grumpy LILO--Help!

[Brian Sweeney]

Jodi-

> Gaaaahhhhh! Please pardon me if I've completely missed
> something obvious because I've only done about six
> installs of RedHat Linux.

Is LILO EVER obvious? ;-)

>It is also marked as the
> active partition (which made 2K crabby but it will
> just have to get over itself).

Yeah, I think in dual-booting my laptop I did some trickery of using LILO
but still marking Win2K as the active partition.  If I can remember how I'll
let you know.

> 4. LILO gives me this error:
> Fatal: Sorry, don't know how to handle device 0x0701.
> LILO was generated using the KDE
> settings/system/autoprobe and looks like this:
>
> boot="/dev/hda3"
> timeout="50"
> message=/boot/message
> root=/dev/loop1

> The only thing I can think of is that there's
> something going on with my mounts--the root filesystem
> claims to be /dev/loop1, which I think is my
> ramdisk...AND hda3 doesn't seem to be mounted and if I
> try, it complains that it's not in fstab or in mtab.

I think you're instinct on the /dev/loop1 being screwy is sound.  I don't
think I've ever seen that as a root fs.  Also, I don't think you want boot
pointing to a partition; I'm pretty sure it has to point to the whole
device; at least, that's how I've always seen it.  But, LILO is coming up
for you, so I wouldn't mess with it.  Just change root=/dev/hda3 (if that's
where linux is).

>.AND hda3 doesn't seem to be mounted and if I
>try, it complains that it's not in fstab or in mtab.
That's weird.  / should be in fstab.  What does fstab has as your /
partition?  I'd change that to /dev/hda3 as well.  Although in RHL7.1 the
fstab file uses labels, not devices.  Ack.  I'm babbling.

As a side not, you shouldn't install Linux with everything on one partition.
I was going to point you to VA Linux's site for good partition scheme
suggestions, but they're no longer doing hardware apparently.  Ah well.
There are plenty of resources out there on the net for partitioning schemes.

BTW, does anyone else know/remember how to tell the I/O port address of an
ide device?  I tried looking through /proc and couldn't find it.  If someone
can tell you, you can look up 0x0701 and see what the heck it's complaining
about.

Good luck; hope this helps.  Sorry if it didn't make sense; I gotta go get
food ;-)

-Brian

-----------------------------------------
Brian Sweeney
bsweeney at physics.ucsb.edu

"Don't be afraid to give a little piece of yourself away.  It will grow
back."
-Ashleigh Brilliant