unbootable hard disk

[Aaron Howell]

Hi there,
The first thing to do in this situation (especially if you have sighted assistance)
is to use grub instead of lilo.
(I'm assuming slackware has support for grub, redhat and debian do so it should do as well).
This will give you a much more powerful shell to work with while trying to debug your problem,
and because grub understands ext2/3 filesystems, its not limited to things like the 512mb boundary (which might be biting you depending on how old your copy of lilo is).
The problem with your below message is that you haven't actually told us what the pc does when you try to boot from the hd.
lilo indicates different error states by how far along it gets in printing the word Lilo.
Do you even get that far, or does lilo not even come up?
If your hard drive is uata66 or uata100, make sure the computer store is using an appropriate cable for it (this might be the source of your dma issues).
You might also have to set a setting in the bios.
We'll need some more details though to tell you where to turn next.
Regards
Aaron
On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 06:45:45AM -0500, Chuck Hallenbeck wrote:
> Hi gang,
> 
> What else should I look for? I have a brand new machine with a 40
> GB Fujitsu HD and I am installing a Slackware 8.1 distro with
> speakup and an external doubletalk. The installation was made
> from a set of diskettes and went without a hitch. The root
> partition was large because I need a lot of space for /tmp and
> perhaps /var in addition to the usual miscellaneous stuff. It is
> about 4 GB and is the first partition. I marked it active with
> fdisk just in case, but installed lilo to the MBR anyway. The
> software and the general configuration is similar to my own
> system. I made a couple of boot disks during the installation
> process, and it is fortunate that I did, because the system will
> not boot from the HD. It boots fine from the floppies I made, but
> not from the HD.
> 
> I checked the bios setup program (a royal pain in the ass) and
> saw that the HD was detected as the primary master, and that it
> was selected as the second priority boot device, right behind the
> floppy. I checked and double checked the installation (in fact I
> did it more than once) being certain to install the kernel from
> the installation boot floppy, but nothing. No error messages, no
> nothing. It acts as though the HD were simply not present,. and
> yet the bios recognizes it, it is on the list of devices to boot
> from, and it works fine when booting from a floppy.
> 
> Well maybe not entirely fine. One more symptom.  When I boot up
> from a floppy and pay attention to how it is working, the HD is
> extremely sluggish. Checking the data transfer rate with hdparm
> -t, I get about 10% the rate I get on my own system. Also, the
> hdparm command is unable to set the DMA option with the -d1
> option. What happens is that the hdparm command causes a 60
> second delay after which the system resumes functioning but
> without the DMA setting changed.
> 
> I am dealing with some idiots at a computer store who are
> convinced the problem is with Linux, and I am equally stubborn in
> insisting that it is not.
> 
> Any notion of what I might be overlooking? This is incredibly
> frustrating. I gave the folks at the store permission to wipe out
> my root partition if they needed to, hoping they would put a DOS
> or Windows OS on it to check it out, but they happen to have a
> Redhat 6.0 disk lying around and are spinning their wheels trying
> to replace Slackware 8.1 with Redhat 6.0 because they suspect
> there is a hangup when Linux tries to use a raid personality.
> 
> Thanks for any ideas.
> 
> Chuck
> 
> 
> -- 
> The Moon is Full
> So visit me sometime at http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh
> 
> 
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