[Techtalk] Lilo error message

[Wim De Smet]

Hi Anne,

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 9:12 PM, Anne Wainwright
<anotheranne at fables.co.za> wrote:
> Wim wrote:
> |> I snipped everything else but this probably doesn't work because the
> |> message option doesn't expect a message but a file that contains a
> |> message. The error that you get ("Fatal: open 1: No such file or
> |> directory") is because it is trying to open the file named "1" (it
> |> truncates everything after the space) and finds it is unable to open
> |> it. If you make a text file /boot/message or something and put your
> |> message in there, then add a line message=/boot/message it should
> |> work.
>
> That made sense. I man'd lilo.conf and indeed I should have done exactly what you say. The message has to be in a file, and that file has to be referenced by a full path as Michelle noted. So I did that and on doing a '# lilo' up pops an error message:
>
> Fatal: open vmlinuz:  no such file or directory
>
> scary! I tried making the line in lilo.conf with the full name vmlinuz-2.2.19pre17 to get the same, so reverted to original wording.

Hmm I'm not sure what could have caused this. Could you attach the
full lilo.conf so we can have a look?

>
> Since I had done nothing except add the incorrect message line in the first place, I wonder if something is corrupted somewhere. As is my sole access to get stuff off the dos drive across the network on this machine I don't plan to do anything fancy or risky unless we have a sure-fire idea. A broken Lilo scares me stiff.

You can always run lilo with the -t option to test only. Also adding
the -v option might help debug it further since it gives you some more
verbose output.

>
> The odd thing is that the Tab still produces the wrong-way-round message (its 1 for linux and 3 for dos, and that is how it works as well)
>
> "Dos    1        Linux      3"

Yeah not sure what causes this, an old lilo bug maybe?

greets,
Wim