Nigel Henry wrote:
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
As I said.
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.
I don't care whether the other machine works, it's irrelevant.
Read the freaking documentation.
--
Cheers
John
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