New Debian Install - HELP!

[Tony Baechler]

Steve Holmes wrote:
> Well for now, I have lilo installed but for some reason, it doesn't
> work right either.  In the mean time, I booted with my slackware cd,
> got into a shell and am trying to run lilo with a chroot to update the
> lilo.conf file.  But now I get a faital error about raid_setup.  god
> knows what's going on here.  What does raid_setup got to do with lilo?
>   


Hi,

Ah, the annoying RAID message.  Well, actually the message has a clue, 
it just isn't obvious.  You can ignore the bit about RAID, that is 
lilo's attempt to be helpful because it is guessing what's wrong.  
Actually, if you look at the rest of the message, it says something 
about no such device as /dev/hda.  If you do "ls /dev" you'll see that 
in fact /dev is empty so of course it won't work.  The solution is to 
not chroot.  Instead, mount your boot partition under /boot or /mnt/boot 
and change your lilo.conf as needed temporarily.  Run something like:

lilo -C /mnt/etc/lilo.conf

That should hopefully work, or at least give a useful error message.  
The problem here is udev.  It creates device files automatically on 
boot.  I don't know if Slackware uses udev or not but none of them used 
to until recent years.  You could try manually creating the /dev/hd? 
files with mknod but that probably still won't work.  If you use 
something like the System Rescue CD which lets you boot into an already 
installed Linux, you should be able to say root=/dev/hda2 on the boot 
command line and fix lilo that way, bypassing the bootloader. Assuming 
you have a working CD burner and can burn CD images, you could try 
downloading the System Rescue CD and burn that.  I only suggest that 
because it lets you boot into a root device without relying on a 
bootloader and I don't think Slack does.  If you go that way, go to:

http://beta.sysresccd.org/

Get the latest 1.1.1 beta .iso.  Burn it and boot into it.  Give it a 
few seconds after the machine does its boot startup and say something like:

rescuecd speakup=synth=spkout root=auto nokeymap

You can ignore the boot messages.  Eventually you should end up at the 
root password for maintenance message.  Try lilo from there and see if 
it helps.  The kernel on the CD uses /dev/sda instead of /dev/hda, so 
change hda to sda in lilo.conf.  Good luck!