On Thursday 25 October 2007 01:23, John Summerfield wrote:
Nigel Henry wrote:
> This is not directly Fedora related.
>
> I connect to the Internet through my Smoothwall, and a serial modem.
> Recently the machine that the Smoothwall is running on has been playing
> up. Harddrive spinning up and down. I have another older machine
> (1.33GHz, 64MB RAM, and 6GB harddrive) which had Win 2000 pro on it, and
> was trying to install a backup Smoothwall on it. The Smoothwall installs
> ok, and lilo is installed, but when I reboot the BIOS does the memory
> check, and all I get next is half a screenfull of "40's" printed out.
> they remain for a few seconds, then I just get a prompt that I can't do
> anything with.
>
> I am wondering if something has been left behind on the harddrive from
> the Win 2000 install, that linux has not been able to remove.
Almost certainly that is not the problem,
You need to read the lilo documentation, it will probably explain to you
exactly what is wrong.
Cheers
John
Thanks to Andy for the dd syntax, but sadly, although it cleared the start of
the drive, I still couldn't get the Smoothwall to boot up post install, just
an "L" followed by a string of 40's after the BIOS memory check. All a bit
weird, as when I bought the machine about 4 years ago when I first started
with computers, it had Win 98 on it, and that worked ok. I passed the machine
onto my son, and he somehow got Win 2000 pro installed on it. I know that was
booting ok, because I tried it. It got as far as wanting the password to get
in, but as I don't know his password I couldn't progress further, but at
least it was booting, so it doesn't seem to be a problem with booting from
the harddrive.
Could a failing cmos battery cause this sort of problem? I cycled down to town
today, but forgot to buy a new one.
John. Lilo is possibly the problem, but I can't see how to re-install it in
the MBR. Saying that though, on the other machine where the Smoothwall is
working ok, there is no problem, and I couldn't be posting this if lilo was
screwed up.
Perhaps the machine is just a piece of junk, and needs to be sent to the
nearest dumpster, but I do like to try and resolve problems, before trashing
what might be a useable machine.
I booted up the problem machine with the Smoothwall installed on it using
Finnix. Running fdisk -l showed the same output as ssh'ing into my smoothwall
that's up and running, but couldn't find a way of chrooting into the
Smoothwall partitions from Finnix. perhaps I'm a bit out of my depth. I was
looking to rerun /sbin/lilo just to see if it hadn't been installed in the
MBR, and maybe that was the problem which resulted in the "L", and half a
screen of 40's when booting up.
Perhaps I should just forget about the problem machine, and trying to install
Smoothwall on it. My current running Smoothwall has settled down, and I can
access the Internet from my Fedora, Debian, and other distros through it.
Thanks for the help guys.
Nigel.