bri...@aracnet.com put forth on 9/24/2010 7:42 PM: > right now I'm thinking I've got something misconfigured, but what ?? > Running lilo manually should fix whatever's going on and it most > certainly isn't.
Did you possibly lose your BIOS LBA configuration before the dist-upgrade, and didn't know it? If your CMOS battery had died, which is quite common on 4-5+ year old systems, and you rebooted the PC, when it came back up your BIOS data would be at defaults. In this case your disk geometry in the BIOS may have changed from say, LBA, to LARGE, or NORMAL. If this occurred, it "might" explain your problems. Once the system is booted after you manually specify /dev/sda2 at the prompt, the ATA driver may be defaulting to LBA mode. Thus, when you run lilo, it's basing sector translation on block offsets using LBA. When you reboot, if the BIOS is set to NORMAL (CHS) or LARGE, the translation isn't going to match what lilo saved in the MBR or the first sector of a partition, whichever method you use. When you specify /dev/sda2 at the prompt, the bootloader is working with the current BIOS translation setting and correctly finds the disk sectors for the root filesystem. This may explain why you can successfully boot in this manner, but not using the normal automatic lilo boot--the sector translations may be different. This is all a shot in the dark and I could be smoking crack. But, it _seems_ possible given your symptoms. Check your mobo BIOS, or PCI card disk controller BIOS, if that's what your disk is attached to, and make sure the drive translation is set to LBA, which is likely what it was before. Like I said, it's a long shot...but worth checking. -- Stan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4c9d85ea.6030...@hardwarefreak.com
