Re: Using live-CD to fix LILO boot
On 06/09/2011 16:02, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
On Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:12:20 +0100
Ron Leach<ronleach(a)tesco.net> wrote:
> Though I use XFCE on my netbook - and very pleased with that, by the
> way - I have been trying to also use the LiveCD to help me fix a LILO
> and RAID configuration on a desktop system.
Well, since Fedora/RHEL have not used lilo in a long time, I assume
this is another distro?
Well, I would wager you never lose at the game 'Cluedo'!
Kevin, you're quite right; it is a Debian system. I reached for the
Fedora LiveCD simply because I use Fedora daily - by choice - and I
really like it, and I thought that perhaps I could check some configs
quickly to see what might be going wrong. I just feel confident in
using it.
I would suggest using rescue media for that
distro. It would be better suited to mounting things and letting you
fix lilo.
After seeing this page
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/14/html/Installation_Guide/ap-...
explaining that Fedora install media have a rescue facility - and
after noticing that the LiveCD didn't - I did dig out my Debian
install CD, and was relieved to see that it, too, does have a rescue
entry. Though I wasn't sure it would help with a boot problem, it did
give a very basic shell. I could mount the raid system and managed to
see various config files but there didn't seem to be any LILO files.
Out of desperation I typed lilo to see if the program itself might be
runnable and might let me set up something and to my surprise, and
delight, it fixed itself.
I am going to dig further so that I understand LILO, I don't want to
be caught out again.
I'm not sure why Debian used LILO; during the original install I had
asked for GRUB but that didn't work on a RAID 1 /boot partition (for
some reason) but the alternative choice of LILO did work, so I had
just let it do that.
The details for how to mounting the system depend a lot. Is it lvm?
does Fedora even see the raid?
I guess from your comment that the LiveCD would not automatically
mount the native machine's filesystems - I didn't even find an
/etc/fstab that had any entries for the physical machines file systems
(it only had entries for the LiveCD filesystem).
The RAID is RAID 1 (dual discs, mirrored), running XFS filesystems;
all partitions except swap are mirrored and the mirror is exactly the
same size, configuration, and partition make-up. I am not sure what
LVM is so perhaps this implies it is not LVM?
Would you have expected the LiveCD to 'see' the system? That would
mean entries in /etc/fstab wouldn't it? (I am not an expert at this.)
Kevin, thanks for the advice,
regards, Ron