Lilo: Unable to determine video adapter in use in present system

[zeroth404]

I've googled this, and I've searched these forums. here's the beef:

Background
I had a perfectly fine tripple booted win2k, win98 and Slackware 10.2 system with two drives, win2k and slackware on /dev/hdb, and win98 on /dev/hda (master).

Now, I unplugged my hard drives, both IDE and Power, to hook up my laptop hard drive (via a crossover plug) to upgrade slackware on my laptop because my laptop CD drive went to **** about 2 years ago (it's a compaq).

Problem
When I plugged my hard drives back in and booted, MBR/Lilo gave me: Error Loading Operating System. Lilo is installed to MBR on /dev/hda.

I swapped the IDE cables on both hard drives, thinking that I'd mistakenly plugged them in to the wrong cable, but the error persisted. I currently have my hard drives plugged in correctly.

Currently
I can boot from my slackware install disc, give "bare.i root=/dev/hdb5" and get my system to boot into Slackware A-Okay. But when I run LILO to try to fix my MBR, Lilo gives me a Warning that I never used to recieve: "Warning: Unable to determine video adapter in use in present system".

I've tried removing my video card and throwing it back in (that works for my SB Audigy When Windows won't detect it, some plug & Play Issue I suppose). I've had quite a bit of trouble with my Audigy.

I'm going to check the bootflag soon on /dev/hda, but I'm certain its set.

[zeroth404]

OK, Scratch all that crap, heres the deal:

When I boot normally, after my PC tries to boot from my two CD drives with nothing in them, it says "Error Loading Operating System" and I am forced to reboot.

BUT, if I have my Windows 2000 Professional CD in a drive, when it tries to boot form CD it will say "Press any key to boot from CD..." and then it will give me like 3 seconds to press a key.

IF I DON'T press a key, LILO BOOT LOADER STARTS, and Everything works just fine!

If I run "lilo -v -t" after booting like this, I don't get that annoying "Warning: Unable to determing video adapter in use in the present system"

But, if I take the CD out, and reboot, I get "Error Loading Operating System"

If I then boot my Linux Installation from the slackware CD, and I try to run "lilo -v -t", it shits out the "Warning: Unable to determing video adapter in use in the present system" warning, unlike before.

heres what I get when I run "lilo -v -t":

$ lilo -v -t
Warning: LBA32 addressing asumed
Reading Boot Sector from /dev/hda
[ this next warning only happens if I booted from my slackware CD ]
Warning: Unable to determing video adapter in use in the present system
Using Bitmap Secondary Loader
Caling map_insert_data_
Mapping bitmap file /boot/lilo.bmp
Calling map_insert_file
Boot Image: /boot/vmlinuz
Adding Linux*
Boot Other: /dev/hda1, on /dev/dev/hda, loader CHAIN

The Boot Sector and the map file have *NOT* been altered

$ lilo, you piss me off.

I thought about booting into Windows, and running fdisk to over-write the MBR and start over with lilo, but I'm afraid that I still won't be able to write to my Boot Sector, and will be stuck with just Windows unless I use my Slack CD.

Any Ideas?

[zeroth404]

Thanks for the help guys! :-p

I figured it out. when I booted with my laptop hard drive connected, BIOS automatically modified my boot sequence. I just had to go in there and switch it back around.

took me a couple days to figure it out though. Keep it Simple!