[ale] Defective BIOS?

[James P. Kinney III]

On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 20:07 -0400, Cor van Dijk wrote:

> >>
> Thanks for your help. I did put the linux drive on IDE1 and in fact it 
> did tried to boot, that is, it came up with "L". That means the BIOS 
> chip is gone?

No. LILO is rather dumb. It has hard coded into it the device locations
that are used for boot up. It displayed the "L" which means the the boot
sector on the drive was found and the begining of the LILO process (the
lowest level boot) was begun. It failed after that since LILO was
installed on that boot sector with the hard drive as hdc.

There are some LILO tricks that can be used to remap the drives to
different hardware addresses. You will need to dig in the man pages on
LILO for the specifics (All of my systems now use grub). Basically it
involves some additional line like "ide2=0x80" to make the system think
that the first device on ide0 is really hdc.
> To Randal Jarret: there is no "boot protection" anywhere in the BIOS 
> screens.
> 
> I am kind of hesitant to start the BIOS from scratch, do I need to write 
> down a sh...load of settings prior to doing that?

It never hurts. That said, most default bios configs will allow a basic
boot mode. The other tweaks are for performance or oddball settings
other than ram, cpu, hard drive, video, keyboard and mouse.

>  Suppose one of them is 
> the culprit, then I would end up in the same situation. There used to be 
> DOS programs that would save and rewrite BIOS info, but I can't find them.
> 
> In my initial post I forgot to mention that I tried the old DOS standby
> "FDISK /MBR", which is supposed to rewrite the bootsector . Did do no good.
> Thanks again, Cor

Ah HA!! If you ran the fdisk /mbr, you just wiped out the boot loader
that was installed by Linux. Windows "doesn't play nicely" with other
OS's. So what you _really_ need to do is boot put all the hardware back
the way it was when it was all working. Boot to linux with the floppy.
The rerun lilo to put the lilo boot up back on the mbr on hda. I am
assuming (and all that implies) that youe were dual booting with lilo
prompts.
> 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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