[SOLVED] lilo broken in kde 13.37 release, unable to login

[murali]

I installed kde 13.37 from live iso, everything went fine until it came to bootloader setup. It gave me the list of other linux distros in my machine which i edited and gave label to each, however on reboot it showed only 1 distro and surprisingly that was not even Salix. So i can't boot into any of the other distros and most importantly salix itself, which i had installed. Quite a strange behavior. And there is no /etc/lilo.conf that i can edit, if i find a way to add the remaining entries.

Is there anyway to fix this or can i install grub from another distro's live cd, will it work?

[gapan]

I installed kde 13.37 from live iso, everything went fine until it came to bootloader setup. It gave me the list of other linux distros in my machine which i edited and gave label to each, however on reboot it showed only 1 distro and surprisingly that was not even Salix. So i can't boot into any of the other distros and most importantly salix itself, which i had installed. Quite a strange behavior. And there is no /etc/lilo.conf that i can edit, if i find a way to add the remaining entries.

You probably took a wrong turn somewhere in there. There might not be an /etc/lilo.conf, but there has to be an /etc/lilosetup.conf.

Is there anyway to fix this or can i install grub from another distro's live cd, will it work?

You can start the live CD again and launch lilosetup from the menu. That will bring up the same bootloader setup window you saw during installation. You can redo the whole thing and make sure you check the configuration file that is created by using the "Edit configuration button". Or you could chroot to the salix partition on the harddrive, edit /etc/lilosetup.conf with a text editor and run lilo with the -C option. You could even run liloconfig while in there, but that will not add the other distributions you have installed. Assuming you installed in /dev/sda1:

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mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
chroot /mnt/sda1
vi /etc/lilosetup.conf
lilo -C /etc/lilosetup.conf

Or you could certainly use grub from another distribution and just add salix to the bootmenu, if you're more familiar with grub.

[murali]

I was looking for lilo.conf based on google search for lilo, having said that i checked for lilosetup.conf and i still don't see it in my installed system, though i remember having seen it in live mode.

After i installed and not able to login, i tried again with live cd and tried just lilo setup and went through the config again, but still nothing happened. Maybe i'll try chroot as per your suggestion.

Yes, i could've used grub from another distro and added salix but i don't have one, so was using salix bootloader in mbr.

Anyway will check one more time and see how it goes.

Thanks.

[gapan]

Define "nothing happened". Were there any messages when you pressed the "Install" button? If there weren't, try running lilosetup.py from a root terminal and see if there are any errors.

You can also chroot and install lilo using liloconfig:

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mkdir /mnt/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
chroot /mnt/sda1
liloconfig
lilo -v

[murali]

During initial install, i did use lilosetup, except didn't use edit configurations. It installed but listed only 1 distro. When i tried the same again today but after doing edit configurations, it listed all the distros. However it booted just salix, remaining ones just got frozen in their respective login screens.

While debugging this issue learnt from one of the websites it was due to lilo and a later version 23.2 or so had the fix, so i chroot'ed and installed the version. Subsequently i had these entries in lilo.conf (remaining entries commented out and not pasted here to avoid too much information) -

image = /boot/vmlinuz-linux
root = /dev/sda5
initrd = /boot/initramfs-linux.img
label = arch
read-only
image = /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-3.2.7-smp
root = /dev/sda8
label = slackware
read-only

and on executing lilo, gives this - Fatal: open /boot/vmlinuz-linux: No such file or directory

whereas that image does exist under /dev/sda5. Also when i reboot the machine i get EBDA too big error.

root[one]# ls -lrt /mnt/sda5/boot/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3147072 Mar 1 09:13 vmlinuz-linux

root[one]# ls -lrt /mnt/sda8/boot/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Mar 16 03:34 vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-huge-smp-3.2.7-smp (salix install)

Any idea what could be going wrong?/

thanks.

[djemos]

Boot from livecd
then i assume arch partition is /dev/sda5 and salix partition is /dev/sda8 and they are mounted under /mnt/sda5 and /mnt/sda8
Then as root do this

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 cp /mnt/sda5/boot/vmlinuz-linux /mnt/sda8/boot
cp /mnt/sda5/boot/initramfs-linux.img /mnt/sda8/boot

next chroot to salix partition

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chroot /mnt/sda8
lilo -v 

reboot

You said that you have installed salix-kde-13.37 from live-iso. Then how there is this line image = /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-3.2.7-smp in you lilo pointing to kernel-2.3.7 from current ?
Or you have installed kernel-3.2.7 from current since slackware 13.37 uses kernel-2.6.37
If you have installed kernel-3.2.7 check if you also have installed kernel-modules-smp-3.2.7

[Shador]

That's not created with lilosetup right? djemos suggestion is a rather hacky fix for the actual problem. Lilo searches all vmlinuz files etc during installation time and they need to be visible in exactly that location underneath the current /.
So when on your Salix installation you need to use /boot/vmlinuz for Salix and /mnt/sda5/boot/vmlinuz-linux for arch, whereas the arch partition should be mounted on /mnt/sda5. The code installed to your hd by the lilo binary, doesn't actually use the paths anymore to access the files during boot time.
Lilosetup does handle all this automatically.

If you want, you could also install grub2 on Salix, which usually creates fully automatically entries for all operating systems installed. Just run from Salix:

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slapt-get -u
slapt-get -i sg2conf
sg2conf

Instead of the last step you can also select the graphical installer from the applications menu. But they're not much different anyway.

[murali]

djemos - Thanks, your solution did work, however i didn't like that approach since i've 5 other distros besides slackware and having to copy each one of their kernel and initrd would've been quite cumbersome and also i've to remember having to copy them every time i've a kernel upgrade in any of them. But this is how lilo works so can't do much anyway. Thanks again as it did allow me to boot booth slack & arch without any issues. And yes, i'm pointing to slack-current and upgraded to 3.2.2

Shador - Thanks to you too for grub command suggestion. I did just that and installed and configured all of them and able to boot into them as well, it was just like about 5 mins of work whereas had a tough time with lilo. Anyway have stopped using lilo for quite a long time so didn't really remembered all the settings well.

I was quite impressed with this version, on a cold boot it took only about 116mb of ram for kde, while i could never get such a low ram usage in any other distro. Is it because this is slack optimized kde or is it due to kde v4.5.5 or something else?

I'm resolving this thread and having solved this problem i'm onto creating the next one - upgrade to 4.8.1 using Eric's setup

[djemos]

djemos - Thanks, your solution did work, however i didn't like that approach since i've 5 other distros besides slackware and having to copy each one of their kernel and initrd would've been quite cumbersome and also i've to remember having to copy them every time i've a kernel upgrade in any of them. But this is how lilo works so can't do much anyway. Thanks again as it did allow me to boot booth slack & arch without any issues. And yes, i'm pointing to slack-current and upgraded to 3.2.2

I did not like that approach either.
I just gave a quick solution to be able to boot into your system and then set up your partitions using liloconfig or lilosetup or grub.

[murali]

Oh, ok, thanks, much appreciated. It did help me out and save some agony.