SuSe 7.3 Upgrade Problems

[littlejohnny]

I'm trying to upgrade from suse 7.0 to 7.3. I use the upgrade only option because this is
my ids box and I don't want anything changed or wiped out.

When all the packages are upgraded, I get the
following:
an error occurred while calling LILO

And at boot up all I get is LI

Any ideas?

Thank you!

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



The official error message for a 'LI' is :



"The first stage boot loader was able to load the second stage bootloader, but has failed to execute it. This can either be caused by a geometry mismatch or by moving /boot/boot.b without running the map installer."



In your case, it almost certainly means that there is a mismatch between the /boot directory after the upgrade and the lilo binary boot record. The solution is to boot the machine somehow, check that /etc/lilo.conf looks ok and then update the boot record with the command (as root) :



/sbin/lilo -v



How to boot the system ? With a boot floppy if you have one or maybe just with the Suse CD. Even if the CD doesn't offer a recover mode you can let ity get to its initial screens and then do a 'control-alt-F2' or 'alt-F2' key sequence to get a root command shell. From there, see if you can mount your root partition and execute the above command. Reboot with 'init 6' . You could also try booting with tom's root/boot disk from -->

http://www.toms.net/rb/

.
If you have a reiserfs partition it might be a bit trickier than this .....


In summary, its probably simple to fix - the only problem is getting the system to boot by alternative means first so that you can fix it.



Regards