On Sat, 25 Sep 2010 00:17:30 -0500 Stan Hoeppner <s...@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
> 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. I have it set to auto which is what it's always been set to. Brian -- 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/20100925004128.18a11...@windy.deldotd.com
