[ale] Defective BIOS?

[Cor van Dijk]

James P. Kinney III wrote:

>On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 20:07 -0400, Cor van Dijk wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Thanks for your help. I did put the linux drive on IDE1 and in fact it 
>>did tried to boot, that is, it came up with "L". That means the BIOS 
>>chip is gone?
>>    
>>
>
>No. LILO is rather dumb. It has hard coded into it the device locations
>that are used for boot up. It displayed the "L" which means the the boot
>sector on the drive was found and the begining of the LILO process (the
>lowest level boot) was begun. It failed after that since LILO was
>installed on that boot sector with the hard drive as hdc.
>
>There are some LILO tricks that can be used to remap the drives to
>different hardware addresses. You will need to dig in the man pages on
>LILO for the specifics (All of my systems now use grub). Basically it
>involves some additional line like "ide2=0x80" to make the system think
>that the first device on ide0 is really hdc.
>  
>
>>To Randal Jarret: there is no "boot protection" anywhere in the BIOS 
>>screens.
>>
>>I am kind of hesitant to start the BIOS from scratch, do I need to write 
>>down a sh...load of settings prior to doing that?
>>    
>>
>
>It never hurts. That said, most default bios configs will allow a basic
>boot mode. The other tweaks are for performance or oddball settings
>other than ram, cpu, hard drive, video, keyboard and mouse.
>
>  
>
>> Suppose one of them is 
>>the culprit, then I would end up in the same situation. There used to be 
>>DOS programs that would save and rewrite BIOS info, but I can't find them.
>>
>>In my initial post I forgot to mention that I tried the old DOS standby
>>"FDISK /MBR", which is supposed to rewrite the bootsector . Did do no good.
>>Thanks again, Cor
>>    
>>
>
>Ah HA!! If you ran the fdisk /mbr, you just wiped out the boot loader
>that was installed by Linux. Windows "doesn't play nicely" with other
>OS's. So what you _really_ need to do is boot put all the hardware back
>the way it was when it was all working. Boot to linux with the floppy.
>The rerun lilo to put the lilo boot up back on the mbr on hda. I am
>assuming (and all that implies) that youe were dual booting with lilo
>prompts.
>  
>
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>>    
>>
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James,
I went trough that drill with fdisk /mbr and then reinstalling lilo 
several times and in different configurations. Whatever I did, I always 
get the "...BIOS drive x82 inaccessible ..." error message. The solution 
was to put both windows and redhat on the first controller (as you 
suggested), works fine, no error messages. The other controller (IDE2) 
now has a cdrom as well as  another linux distro without any problem. I 
can now boot three systems. The only thing I cannot do is access the 
boot sector of /dev/hda from either /dev/hdd or /dev/hdc when these have 
hd's on them (not cdrom of course). It is of course possible that this 
never could be done and that I was never in that situation; this is kind 
of unlikely because I have messed with multiple booting for years and 
never had this probem.

Anyway, it seems most of my problems are solved. The only reason I 
wanted to revive the windows is that I have a hp slide scanner for which 
I never could find a linux driver. Your help was invaluable. Cor.