My windows drive (drive 0) holding the mbr with the lilo info went south
tonight. A bit if history. Drive 0 can occasionly be flaky and refuse to
boot; when that has happened in the past I've booted using a Linux CD
and selected boot with existing os, then jumped into root, and told root
to create a boot floppy. Did that tonight but was consisently told that
the write to the floppy failed. Tried it with the existing floppy
normally used and with a newly ext2 formatted floppy. In both cases I
got the write error saying that the floppy either wasn't formatted or
write-protected, neither of which was true.
When I tried to boot from either of the floppies I got the LIL_ response
and boot failure. After a while the drive 0 came back to life - well.
actually after a couple of pats on it's fanny - and I thought all was
well, but not so! The LILO splash screen pops up, I select Linux, and
boot starts only to stop with:
request_module[block-major-8]: Root fs not mounted
VFS: Cannot open root device "813" or 08:13
Please append a correct "root=" boot option
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 08:13
So it seems to me that the info in lilo.conf is what's corrupted, or am
I mis-reading what these message lines mean? Regardless, the system
doesn't boot and I need it to boot. What do I need to do and how do I do
it? ;-(
I can boot using a knoppix disk (to read and write mail - that's about
all) but I do not understand how I get from knoppix to do any repair
work on the box. I realize I posed this question prior, but in all
honesty did not understand what I was being told. Any help here GREATLY
appreciated.
drive 0 (windows) is sdb1, and drive 1 is the linux drive with sdc1 as /
(has all my boot and vmlinuz files) and sdc3 with everything else.
Dont know if this helps, but here is the output of lilo.log:
Ignoring entry 'boot'
LILO version 21.6, Copyright (C) 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger
Linux Real Mode Interface library Copyright (C) 1998 Josh Vanderhoof
Development beyond version 21 Copyright (C) 1999-2000 John Coffman
Released 04-Oct-2000 and compiled at 19:20:40 on Jan 21 2001.
Reading boot sector from /dev/fd0
Merging with /boot/boot.b
Device 0x0811: BIOS drive 0x81, 255 heads, 2231 cylinders,
63 sectors. Partition offset: 63 sectors.
Secondary loader: 16 sectors.
Device 0x0811: BIOS drive 0x81, 255 heads, 2231 cylinders,
63 sectors. Partition offset: 63 sectors.
Mapping message file /boot/message
Device 0x0811: BIOS drive 0x81, 255 heads, 2231 cylinders,
63 sectors. Partition offset: 63 sectors.
Message: 0 sectors.
Boot image: /boot/vmlinuz
Device 0x0811: BIOS drive 0x81, 255 heads, 2231 cylinders,
63 sectors. Partition offset: 63 sectors.
Setup length is 8 sectors.
Mapped 0 sectors.
Mapping RAM disk /boot/initrd
Device 0x0811: BIOS drive 0x81, 255 heads, 2231 cylinders,
63 sectors. Partition offset: 63 sectors.
RAM disk: 0 sectors.
Added linux *