[huskerlug] Serious hard drive/boot loader problems! (LONG)
- From: "Jon Richardson" <asmstudio@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: huskerlug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2002 17:27:40 -0500
Hi guys,
I'll start out with the story. I purchased a 40 gig western digital 7200
rpm at best buy to use as my linux drive. I installed it as a master on the
second channel, on the first channel i have a 60 gig maxtor with windows xp.
Anyways, I installed suse 8.0 from the ftp. It took along time. I awoke
the next morning to find it almost completed noticing it didn't give me an
option to install lilo. (Probably because i took so long to respond, it
automatically installed lilo to the mbr on /dev/hda) So I happily rebooted
my computer. Lilo fires up and issues this message: "LI".
Ok, this gave my an opportunity to fix lilo and learn a lot about it. I
wasn't sure what the problem was, but I read quite a few how-tos on lilo. I
restored the mbr to the windows xp bootloader then I loaded up my linux
rescue disk, mounted my newly created suse partitions and accessed them with
ease. I wanted to reinstall lilo on the mbr of /dev/hda (master on first
channel). So i issued the command "lilo -M /dev/hda" (after configuring
lilo.conf). Lilo reported "mbr updated". I rebooted, lilo didn't even
install itself. I fired up the rescue again, and issued the commmand
"lilo". I knew this was suppose to install lilo on the mbr of the current
drive (/dev/hdc). It errored saying "can't handle device 0x0102". Someone
on irc told me that was the device kmem. Which made sense, since my rescue
loaded everything on the ram disk.
At this point i decided to give up on suse 8.0 on this computer. So
installed mandrake. The install went without a hitch. Rebooted, lilo
worked like a charm. At this point I thought it was a suse-lilo problem. I
wasn't sure. Mandrake didn't satisfy my needs and I wanted to try redhat
7.3. So installed it with lilo(keep in mind i'm installing linux on the 40
gig western digital /dev/hdc) rebooted and the same error "LI". I tried
grub with redhat 7.3, receiving the error "GRUB ". I thought this was
weird. So i ran all the diagnostics i could think of. Western digital
includes a nice diagnostic disk. I ran everything on that disk, and it
checked out ok. I booted up windows xp to run partition magic 7.0.
Partition magic reported an error about the second harddrive saying it could
fix it. So i let it fix it. Tried installing redhat again. It was no
good, same problem. I loaded windows again and partition magic complained
of other errors that it couldn't fix. It wouldn't even let me repartion my
hard drive.
I installed mandrake again, it worked without a problem. Loaded up windows
again, ran PM and more errors, i formated the disk this time to fat32 to run
some of the windows diagnostics. No errors.
I decided the hell with it. I thought the drive might be bad, so exchanged
it for another one. I installed redhat 7.3 on this new one and the same
problem occurred.
I have no idea what is causing these problems. The only thing that i can
think of is that i have a hot swapable hd bay that i bought from DIT for
like 13 usd. But the bios doesn't see it, and it seems to be transparent to
everything. Another problem i thought of was, that i have an ata66 ide
cable in an ata33 controller. But i knew that shouldn't cause a problem.
But what is so weird is that mandrake installs and boots ok, but redhat 7.3,
suse 7.3 and suse 8.0 don't.
Any ideas guys? I'm so damned lost... sorry this is so long. I know i can
put lilo on a floppy, and i don't have a problem doing this, i just want to
know what is causing these problems.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Jon Paul
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