Subject: Booting problems

From: "David C. Winters" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 1996 21:44:14 -0400 (EDT)

I'm running into a problem with one, lone Linux box right now.
After the BIOS bootstraps, the drive and CD-ROM and recognized, and the 3.5"
floppy is seen, instead of saying "LILO" as a preface to LILO's booting into
Linux, the following comes up:

xFA:

(where x == /dev/hdax according to whichever partition is enabled as the
active partition--I get "2FA:" if it tries to boot off of /dev/hda2 or
"3FA:" for /dev/hda3)

	When this problem first came up, I found that I'm able to boot via
floppy into Linux--but the partition table was fine, as was LILO and the
/etc/lilo.conf file.  I did a full reinstall onto /dev/hda2 anyway, with the
same result.  The full, initial install onto /dev/hda3 was just another
attempt at it (that partition is earmarked for NT on the machines in my
cluster), but I got "3FA:" instead.  (Just booting into Linux and leaving it
at that isn't an option.  Because it's a cluster machine, I need it to boot
off of the HD so I can BIOS-lock the floppy out of the boot cycle.)
	I did have this problem on a second machine, but a full reinstall
took care of it--but didn't teach me anything.  Neither machine had any more
on it than the five-floppy initial installation set puts on it.  I'm using
1.1.

David [email-masked]
Office: 3503 WeH, x86720
MTFBWY

---

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 96 20:07 PDT

From: "David C. Winters" <[email-masked]>
> Linux, the following comes up:

This is from Debian's master boot record. Press "2" to boot partition 2,
'F' to boot the floppy, etc. I suggest you re-install the LILO package and
say "no" to the first question (which asks if you want to use the existing
LILO configuration) and "yes" to all subsequent questions.

Either the partition is not bootable for some reason, or you have a shift key
down when the system boots. Otherwise you would not see this.

	Bruce