[ale] My boot sector looks dead.

[Ben Phillips]

On Sat, 2 Jan 1999, Jeremy T. Bouse wrote:
> 	I've had the power go out on my servers before... have you ran
> fsck against the partition with the boot sector on it?

Check.  fsck found nothing.  e2fsck found nothing.

Vernard Martin wrote:
> I've discovered that if you partitioned a hard drive using LBA mode and
> then later went back and set it to NORMAL or LARGE mode then this will
> occur. Make sure that BIOS is set to whatever mode it was in when you
> partitioned the drive. 

Tried playing with these settings a bit, but the drive was partitioned by
someone else before I ever got it (meaning, with a different BIOS).  So I
don't know what it was set to, but no settings seem to make any difference
except 'Auto', which causes the BIOS to completely fail to recognize the
drive. :)  All the other settings let it recognize the thing, but booting
still only gets me 'LI'.

On a related note, how do you make a boot disk that prompts for no
parameters and mounts something random like, oh, /dev/hdc1 as the root
partition?  (w/only Slackware)

                      __   _
Ben Phillips         /  '_' )         ,,,    "If it's a hobby for us and a
pynk at cc.gatech.edu   |  | ()|||||||||[:::)   job for you, then why are you
                     \__.-._)         '''    doing such a shoddy job?"
		                              -- Linus Torvalds to Microsoft