Restore lilo

[jjbergdolt]

Knoppix 3.8.1 is installed on my hard drive.
I tried to defrag my partition with e2defrag from the Knoppix CD.
Thinks looked running well.
But now I am unable to boot again from the hard drive.
When I try to restore lilo from the Knoppix CD I get a message saying the hard drive is protected against writing.
How to proceed for the boot restoration?

I tried to follow the procedure #52 described in the O'Reilly book "Knoppix at 200%".
But remounting the hd is rejected because of the writing protection.

[UnderScore]

Lets assume that hda1 is a windows C: drive & hda2 is your root partition.
Boot with knoppix with the boot cheat code: knoppix 2 vga=normal
At the prompt, mount the root partition: mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2
Chroot into the mounted root partition: chroot /mnt/hda2 /bin/bash
Re-apply lilo: /sbin/lilo
Exit the chroot:exit
Unmount the root partition: umount /mnt/hda2
reboot the machine.

That said: Why would you defrag the root partition? Linux filesystems do not exhibit the same file fragmentation problems that occur with Windows FAT32 & NTFS filesystems.

From https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-March/msg04277.html
Defragmentation is generally not necessary under Linux's
ext2/ext3 filesystems. If fragmentation ever becomes an
issue at all (which is very rare), it's mostly likely under these
conditions:
1. The filesystem is frequently near full capacity
2. There is a lot of writing and deleting going on.
For #2, it's especially troublesome for files that are written
a little bit at a time (they "grow" slowly), such as log files--
files written all in one shot are fairly imune to fragmentation.

from Using Disks And Other Storage Media (http://library.n0i.net/linux-unix/administration/linux%20system%20administration%20white%20papers/ch23/23-08.html)

Fighting Fragmentation

When a file is written to disk, it can’t always be written in consecutive blocks. A file that is not stored in consecutive blocks is fragmented. It takes longer to read a fragmented file, since the disk’s read-write head will have to move more. It is desirable to avoid fragmentation, although it is less of a problem in a system with a good buffer cache with read-ahead.

The ext2 filesystem attempts to keep fragmentation at a minimum, by keeping all blocks in a file close together, even if they can’t be stored in consecutive sectors. ext2 effectively always allocates the free block that is nearest to other blocks in a file. For ext2, it is therefore seldom necessary to worry about fragmentation. There is a program for defragmenting an ext2 filesystem, see

In most cases defragging a linux partition is not necessary and if it is necessary you would have enough experience & to know what to do & how to recover from it. If you do not know WHY you need to do something, then don't do it & seek someone's help.