Using live-CD to fix LILO boot

[Ron Leach]

On 06/09/2011 16:02, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:12:20 +0100
> Ron Leach<ronleach at 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-rescuemode.html

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