stuck on "LI"

[ron.peterson at yellowbank.com (Ron Peterson)]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Robert P. Sarao wrote:

> >          I seem to be stuck on "LI"... I am rebuilding my pc, it was a
> > dual boot rh7.1 and win2k adv. serv. I extended the partitions (blew them
> > away actually) and rebuilt with win 2k. It was still coming up with the
> > lilo loader (still sketchy with that) and I would choose dos.... After
> > putting up SP2, it came up stuck on "LI" as it was loading the lilo boot
> > loader. I'm sure that this is a real easy fix...So if anyone knows one..
> > please help me out... Thank you.

It sounds like you had a master boot record that worked, so perhaps your
lilo.conf is still valid.  In that case, use a rescue disk to get yourself
booted into Linux, and rerun lilo on your old lilo.conf.  If you boot off
of the RH7.1 rescue CD, your linux root will get mounted under
/thepathto/myroot (I don't recall where exactly, but there will be a
message that tells you).  You'll need to pass the -r option to
lilo to tell it to chroot to your system root.  Like:

lilo -r /thepathto/myroot

If this works, you might consider backing up your MBR, using dd.  Like:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/root/mbr-save.bin bs=512 count=1

then you can always get it back by doing the inverse:

dd if=/root/mbr-save.bin of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

likewise, you could zero your mbr by doing:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1

Assuming that you have Windows installed on hda5, you can greatly improve
the stability of your system by doing:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda5 bs=8192

Just to be sure - that's a joke...

All of this is assuming your hard drive is hda.  If your disks are SCSI,
you might do sda instead, for example.

I'm surprised a service pack would munge the MBR...

-- 

-Ron-
https://www.yellowbank.com/

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