On Wed, 3 Jul 2002 19:16:40 -0400
Mike
I've tried cleaning the floppy drive and have managed a boot failure but still no boot from floppy.
Have you checked the bios settings? Some bios have multiple settings needed for booting from floppy. One is the boot order, another is "floppy seek at boot", there may be others.
Can I interrupt the boot sequence before lilo prompt to manually do something?
I've now tried
linux single linux root=/dev/fd0 linux boot=/dev/fd0 linux image=/boot/vmlinuz
at the boot prompt enter: linux init=/bin/sh This will tell the kernel to simply launch a shell instead of starting the init process. So you immediately become root and there's no need to log in (this is the reason why LILO should be password protected and allow passing of kernel parameters only to authorized people; see the documentation in /usr/doc/packages/lilo). Now you are on your own. You have only this little shell but you have the power of root. As the init system didn't run you will have to do everything manually: mount -n -o remount,rw / # re-mount root partition read/write mount /usr # if /usr is on a separate partition vi /etc/passwd # correct your changes umount /usr mount -n -o remount,ro / # re-mount the root partition readonly sync # very important reboot # or press RESET if reboot doesn't work # / is readonly so it's safe Yes, it is THAT easy to break into a system. So, LILO should be password protected and one should not have MS-DOS on the same machine because parameter passing works with loadlin just like with LILO of course. Or make booting DOS a password protected option for LILO, too. -- use Perl; #powerful programmable prestidigitation