Problem installing Gentoo

OLBAM · n00b Joined: 11 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

I installed Gentoo over the weekend, and everything seems to have gone well except for one thing; I can't boot Gentoo. I had Mandrake installed on my computer before, and when I boot up I get the Mandrake LILO. I have two hard disks, with Windows installed on hda and Gentoo installed on hdb. Mandrake lived on hdb, although it appears its LILO was in the boot sector of hda. I mounted hda1 to have a look, but I didn't see any lilo.conf files. Any help any of you can give me as to how I can kill this devil bootloader would be greatly appreciated.

st589 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Sep 2003 Posts: 83

Did you choose lilo as the bootloader during the Gentoo setup? If you did, you should have ran /sbin/lilo and it should have overwrote the old boot record.

OLBAM · n00b Joined: 11 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

I actually installed GRUB the first time around on hdb1 the first time I ran the gentoo install. I booted up the LiveCD again though, and tried to install LILO on hda. It didn't like that though, said that there wasn't a valid boot signiature on the drive.

OLBAM · n00b Joined: 11 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

Okay, some better information. On hda1, i have the following 3 folders:

-One named grub, which seems to contain the GRUB I attempted to install on hda. This perterbs me for two reasons. The first reason is that when I tried to install GRUB on hda1, it told me it failed. The second reason is that if the Gentoo GRUB is on hda1, why the hell am I greeted by the Mandrake loader?

-a folder called Lost+Found. This appears to be empty.

-a folder named boot. When I try to go into boot, it appears to just send me back to the same place (I have the same 3 folders). I can go into boot as many times as I want, and I never get anything different. The contents of grub and Lost+Found are always the same and I only have to go up one level to get out.

flybynite · l33t Joined: 06 Dec 2002 Posts: 620

Bootloaders have two parts - the setup files and the bootloader itself. Installing grub or lilo on your system is different than grub or lilo installing the bootloader portion of itself in the MBR. Does that make sense to you?

The system bios is booting from hda which is the first bootable partition it found. Even if you have a gentoo bootloader on hdb it won't boot because the bios finds the one on hda first.

You can handle this in a few different ways. If you still have mandrake you can add gentoo as boot choice just like you probably added windows as a boot choice. This might be what you want if you still want to play with mandrake.

If you don't want mandrake anymore then you need to reread the install docs and have either grub or lilo install a bootloader into the MBR of hda. I think the error you got was because you tried to have lilo install to hda1....

heckler · n00b Joined: 16 Oct 2003 Posts: 9

did u RUN lilo after modify ???
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OLBAM · n00b Joined: 11 Nov 2003 Posts: 4

I did /sbin/lilo or whatever the command is that makes LILO run.

azlan · Posted: Thu Nov 13, 2003 2:25 am Post subject:

hey! hey! hey!

you guys .... the problem is not with the hdx1 on either disk

the bios looks for a boot loader on the mbr (or master boot record) of the first hard drive it comes to, unless otherwise set in the bios.

you need to have grub install itself on the mbr of hda1 or, you need to set the bios to boot from the second hard drive.

this has nothing to do with your boot partition!

cheers!

oh ya and don't forget, gentoo rocks!
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