What is with the 99's??

[thegroover]

I have completed a hd install of Knoppix KDE 3.1 (so I thought) but on rebooting my machine I am confronted with L 99 99 99 99 99 ... and so on for about a third of the screen right after it has mentioned "Veryifying DMI Pool Data".

I havn't seen this before and I'm wondering 1. Why is it there, and 2. How do I rectify the situation.

Thanks heaps.

[Tortoise]

Perhaps you have killed LILO?
Try reinstalling it.

[thegroover]

Sorry, I don't know what 'Lilo' is... I just ran knx-hdinstall followed the prompts and went from there...

[Tortoise]

Did it ever work, or has this started after it having work previously?

[thegroover]

Worked previously on CDrom only. This happened straight after rebooting my computer from the hd install.

[rickenbacherus]

Are you dual booting w/ wimpdoze or do you only have Knoppix installed? If you just have Knoppix then.....

Boot the Knoppix cd.
Open a terminal and do this:

sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
chroot /mnt/hda1
/sbin/lilo -v

If you're dual booting w/ windows then you may need to edit /etc/lilo.conf

If it fails to work or errors post your /etc/lilo.conf file please.

[thegroover]

chroot /mnt/hda1

I got an error


Cannot change root directory to mnt/hda1: Operation not permitted

I am assuming I havn't got "Administrators Access" but I have no idea how to get it considering I never entered a password into Linux anywhere! :?

Please advise.

[rickenbacherus]

Anytime you get a permission error you can retry with 'sudo' so..

sudo chroot /mnt/hda1

[thegroover]

Well, I searched on this site and found how to make a root password to gain the full access. I then proceeded to do the following commands


sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
chroot /mnt/hda1
/sbin/lilo -v

I received this error on the /sbin/lilo


Unrecognized token "! Please edit etc/lilo.conf before running lilo !" At or above line 20 in file 'etc/lilo.conf'

Here is everything from line 1 to 20 inclusive. I'm not too sure how to edit this file because I have no orientation to where anything is with this whole ramdisk this, cdrom that, mount the other... but here goes:


# /etc/lilo.conf - See: `lilo(8)' and `lilo.conf(5)',
# --------------- `install-mbr(8)', `/usr/share/doc/lilo/',
# and `/usr/share/doc/mbr/'.

# Remove this line when you are done configuring. -KK
"! Please edit /etc/lilo.conf before running lilo!"

# +---------------------------------------------------------------+
# | !! Reminder !! |
# | |
# | Don't forget to run `lilo' after you make changes to this |
# | conffile, `/boot/bootmess.txt', or install a new kernel. The |
# | computer will most likely fail to boot if a kernel-image |
# | post-install script or you don't remember to run `lilo'. |
# | |
# +---------------------------------------------------------------+

# Support LBA for large hard disks.
#
lba32

Thanks in advance. I am weary of my unexperience and have come close to exploding at this a few times now. Your help is much appreciated.

Ps> It was a bugger of a thing getting this stupid text on a disk! apparently I needed to CTRL+Z the program 'less' for it to update the terminal window with the text I wanted... Go on, have a laugh at my expense... My shout.

[Stephen]

Unrecognized token "! Please edit etc/lilo.conf before running lilo !" At or above line 20 in file 'etc/lilo.conf'



# Remove this line when you are done configuring. -KK
"! Please edit /etc/lilo.conf before running lilo!"



There is no comment ( # ) in front of the line starting with "!Please.
Just edit the file and remove the entire line or put the comment ( # ) there save the file and then run lilo again with the chroot command. eg. from the cd boot.


sudo mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
sudo gvim /mnt/hda1/etc/lilo.conf




Then you would sudo chroot /mnt/hda1 /sbin/lilo -v

[rickenbacherus]

Hmmm- does LILO do that to anybody else? How odd that it wrote a file w/ an uncommented line.

[Stephen]

Hmmm- does LILO do that to anybody else? How odd that it wrote a file w/ an uncommented line.
No I've never seen that it seemed kinda strange here too.

[fhayashi]

The lilo problem happened to me when I installed Knoppix on to the hard drive too.

In my case, hda was WinXP, hdb I wanted to be linux.

I think the hd-install script had problems writing onto hda, since it was read only.

I ended up getting everything worked out by somehow switching between the Knoppix install (which configured X-window correctly and not lilo) and the Debian install CD (which I could not get to configure X-window correctly, but did configure lilo correctly...).

I think it worked by first installing Debian, then running Knoppix off the CD, doing the hd install script, but not having it mess with lilo...

[Dave_Bechtel]

--It does that by *default* from the CD until you edit it. Altho when you do the knx-hdinstall, the script edits the file for you and throws it out to your new root dir.

--Basically the lilo.conf on the cd is quite useless unless you know what you're doing with lilo. When redoing lilo from CD boot on a broken hdinstall, I always have to edit lilo.conf on the HD and put in where *my* /etc/ is mounted:



# From knoppix cd xxx
#map=/mnt/hdb1/boot/map
map=/boot/map


image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-xfs
# xxx from suse or hdb:
#image=/mnt/extra2/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-xfs
# xxx from kpx cd
#image=/mnt/hdb1/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-xfs
label=KPX2420
initrd=/boot/initrd-2420.gz
# xxx from suse or hdb:
# initrd=/mnt/extra2/boot/initrd.gz
# xxx from kpx cd
# initrd=/mnt/hdb1/boot/initrd.gz
read-only


--You can see how that would get confusing, especially if you don't remember to backout the changes for CD-land and try that from HD-land. ;-)

--Anyway, from the CD (recovery/repair mode) I end up doing:

' lilo -v 1 -C /mnt/hdb1/etc/lilo.conf -s /dev/null ' == This gets around the "read only filesystem" error. See 'man lilo' for details.

--A side note: always say "YES" when it asks if you want to make a boot floppy. JIC.



Hmmm- does LILO do that to anybody else? How odd that it wrote a file w/ an uncommented line.
No I've never seen that it seemed kinda strange here too.

[Stephen]

' lilo -v 1 -C /mnt/hdb1/etc/lilo.conf -s /dev/null ' == This gets around the "read only filesystem" error. See 'man lilo' for details.


One more usefull tidbit for the bag of tricks you got all kinds of them dave, thanks for the info.

[thegroover]

sudo gvim /mnt/hda1/etc/lilo.conf

did that... got this


E25: GUI cannot be used: Not enabled at compile time

So, I thought about it and figured it must've been that I was using a console window, so I used the CRTL+ALT+F1 that was mentioned to me ages ago to get into the console figuring because it wasn't graphical, it meant it was the be all and end all place to do things. (I'm learning :wink: )

I got the same error message again. This is terrible! surely not everyone has this many hassles? I am not completely stupid either, inexperienced yes but not stupid so I havn't done anything I can see as being obviously wrong.

Maybe it's the version I've got... I got it off a PC Magazine for $15AUD. Maybe it is a special compile deliberately made to make it impossible to install easily... I don't know.

Thanks everyone for the help so far... the battle is far from won though... sorry. :?


if anyone uses MSN Messenger, please contact me on there the_groover_1234@hotmail.com

I could really use some live help... but from one of you who already have a history of the problem.

[rickenbacherus]

OK- gvim is just an editor. If it doesn't want to work you can use another like so:

sudo mcedit /mnt/hda1/etc/lilo.conf

or

sudo xedit /mnt/hda1/etc/lilo.conf

Sorry but it isn't likely that you'll ever see me on msn anything. They couldn't pay me enough. Now if you want to get on IRC sometime just say the word- trust me it works a whole lot better than instant messaging.

[thegroover]

Well, I went on to irc.knoppix.net#knoppix and had a great chat to grepper (thanks mate) and what I needed to do was make lilo.conf not read only then I edited it using vi etc/lilo.conf and found the error and fixed it.

It was a simple matter of then going lilo -v to write to the boot record (or whatever it's called :wink: ) and then I rebooted my computer.

Now, I am presented with another set back!!

Booting from the hard drive, it goes through the processes of starting up such as uncompressing linux and booting the kernel then I get the below message


Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:05

Apparently this means I am not booting off the right hard drive... I need to hold shift when linux starts to get a boot menu but then what?

Thanks in advance.

[Stephen]

Apparently this means I am not booting off the right hard drive...

Post the output of sudo fdisk -l /dev/hd? from a CD boot and also the entire /etc/lilo.conf file. Replace the ? with the drive letter for the HD most likely a.