Re: [TCLUG:8685] Problem booting install floppy/cdrom (cracked

[Mark Dalton <mwd@sgi.com>]

Darn, it was a bad floppy drive (apparently), and I have asked him to
replace the SCSI cdrom also (just as a last ditch effort).

It appears it was a bizzare coincedance..
	- Systems cracked into.. files unedittable (for root on the local disk)
	- floppy not bootable/usable
	- cdrom not usable
Unfortunately, the system is at a not physically accessable to me.

Mark

> 
> >         - The boot does not seem to 'see' the floppy even after we changed
> >            the BIOS to look at drive 'a' first.
> 
> Do you get any part of the boot loader to start?  Does it just seem to skip
> the booting from floppy?  I would recommend trying to make a different boot
> disk on a computer that is different from wherever the current boot disk was
> made..  Some floppy drives fail silently when they can't boot, and that's
> usually due to incompatible formatting of some kind, in my experience (i.e.,
> the read head could be mis-aligned)
> 
> If none of that works, the box will probably have to be taken somewhere, so a
> different floppy drive can be used to boot from..
> 
> >         - We also tried the same for the CDROM (by having the CDROM be the
> >            primary boot device, however, it is a SCSI CDROM.
> >            We did try the LILO: linux scd0=cdrom
> 
> Does the LILO prompt come from the CDROM?  (hmm, probably not, since RedHat
> uses SysLinux..)  One possible work-around would be to somehow boot DOS with
> CDROM  drivers and run the AUTORUN.BAT file.  Another might be to type in
> something along the lines of 'linux root=/dev/scd0' (does that actually work,
> or am I thinking about a Slackware boot diskette?)
> 
> -- 
>  _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Don't confuse me with 
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> \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)                            
> [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088 | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]
> 
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-- 
Mark Dalton       CH3-S-CH2 H                      H      O       H
Silicon Graphics, Inc.  |   |                      |       \      |
Eagan, MN 55121         CH2-C-COO    //\ ---C--CH2-C-COO    C-CH2-C-COO
mwd@sgi.com                 |       |  ||   ||     |       //     |
                            NH3      \\/ \ / CH    NH3    O       NH3
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My home page: http://www.cbc.umn.edu/~mwd/mwd.html
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