Have to keep reinstalling LILO was Re: UEFI is a POS

[Robert Myers]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 2:45 AM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:

> There is a default location for the EFI loader that Fedora is not using (but is for USB/CD).

While we are on the subject of boot loaders:

I have been wiping hard disks from systems that are no longer in use.
One disk, which had been part of a booting striped raid, would not
even allow me to dd to it, or so I thought, because I couldn't even
read the partition table.  I marked the disk as borked and moved on.

Then the Windows OS on the machine I was using to wipe disks became so
corrupted that I could only boot it into a live CD, which was good
enough, but I still wanted access to those old Windows files and
didn't want to continue using a live CD as my only way of accessing
the machine.

Since the machine would never be used for web-surfing (for which
purpose I use another Linux distribution that I will never mention
again on this list), I installed Fedora on the borked disk just to see
what would happen.  Before attempting the install, I deliberately
overwrote the MBR.  The Fedora install went through just fine, but
then the system wouldn't boot, not even putting LILO on the drive with
an intact MBR.

Long story short, with LILO on the original Windows drive, if I ever
turn the power off, I have to "reinstall" Fedora, which merely
reinstalls LILO, and everything goes through just fine, including the
reboot.  That is to say, Anaconda can find the new drive, install to
it, and correctly set some volatile boot pointer to the new drive that
gets lost if I ever turn off the power.

It's merely a nuisance, and I *really* don't want to try to fix the
MBR on the second drive any more than I already have (using MSI-SYS).
Any suggestions?  Why can't Anaconda permanently tell LILO where the
second drive is?  Presumably because the bios gets there ahead of LILO
and screws everything up after I have powered down, but that's only a
guess.

Robert.