[antoshka]

i installed RH7.3 (psyche?) from CDs that i downloaded and burned. everything went smooth during the installation. i chose LILO as my boot manager. i don't remember if i installed it in master boot partition (or smth like that) or in the other one

now when i turn the computer off, the system finds the boot record on IDE0, but when it starts booting it outputs a single character L and hangs. responds to Ctrl-Alt-Del no problem, but never produces any output except that letter L. does not allow to type anything either.

yet, if i use boot floppy that i created during the installation - it boots no problem.

what can it be? please, help!

thanks a lot! i really appreciate any kind of advise!

Anton.

[Dolda2000]

You should have chosen GRUB instead of LILO. Would you mind redoing that installation?

[yowwww]

it was smart to create a boot floppy - I did that in order to not overwrite the master boot record, but you went one step further by doing both.
Dolda is right, grub is much better, you should have chosen that instead. You could just use the boot disk.

You could get rid of lilo by clearing the mbr but I am not sure if you are dual booting or not.

Usually to clear the mbr, you use a dos floppy or a win 98 cd and use the support on it and type:
fdisk /mbr at the C:\ prompt

Let us know if you have any other issues. If you want to use grub, you can install it after you clear your mbr by using the red hat cd.

Check out this site on grub:

http://www.geocities.com/cyberkabila/main/grub.htm

[Dolda2000]

Originally Posted by yowwww

Usually to clear the mbr, you use a dos floppy or a win 98 cd and use the support on it and type:
fdisk /mbr at the C:\ prompt

NO! Don't ever do that unless you know _precisely_ what you're doing! If DOS FDISK discovers any other partition types than FAT partitions while using /MBR, it will completely erase and reset the entire partition table. That applies for NTFS as well, so if you're using Winbloze 2000 or XP, use their partition manager instead.

[yowwww]

that's why I told him to check it out first, but even if you are using a ntfs based OS, you can just use the OS cd and use the rescue mode to install the boot menu/sequence again

fdisk /mbr is very useful, but of course, like anything else, you need to know what you are dealing with first.

[antoshka]

wow thanx for replies guys!

i normally use windows, but this is my 2nd computer and i decided to install linux there, cuz i wanna run a web server and do some programming... so it's ok, i have time to set it up going thru any kind of trial-and-error troubles

i re-installed everything (with GRUB), but i still have the problem with booting. it says "GRUB loading stage2" (or smth like that) and hangs. yet, it still boots no problem with a floppy.

i did not do fdisk /mbr. maybe i should? yeah, i think i'll try that.

also, maybe i should just install linux without a boot loader (i don't really need windows on that computer)? would that solve the problem as well?

thanx a lof for your help!!!

Anton.

[Dolda2000]

Whether or not you have Windows on the computer, you will still need a boot loader. What else would load the kernel?
It seems that your BIOS has LBA problems. Have you created a boot partition, and if so, where on the drive did you put it.

[antoshka]

i used Autopartition when installing linux. also... i just remembered something. when i was configuring linux before intalling it, it asked me for some parameter to pass somewhere and it said to leave it blank if i'm not sure what it was. that textbox was not really blank, so i deleted stuff in there and installed it like that (blank!). i think it had somethign to do with LBA... do you think that might be the reason?

[Dolda2000]

No, that was probably the default kernel command line, so it's not related to GRUB's startup.
Can you post the output of "fdisk -l /dev/hda" here?

[yowwww]

is plug n play disabled in the bios? if not, then do that

did you create a boot disk also? if so, then use that and then you can get and post some stuff like your grub.conf file