On Thursday 25 October 2007 01:23, John Summerfield wrote: > Nigel Henry wrote: > > This is not directly Fedora related. > > > > I connect to the Internet through my Smoothwall, and a serial modem. > > Recently the machine that the Smoothwall is running on has been playing > > up. Harddrive spinning up and down. I have another older machine > > (1.33GHz, 64MB RAM, and 6GB harddrive) which had Win 2000 pro on it, and > > was trying to install a backup Smoothwall on it. The Smoothwall installs > > ok, and lilo is installed, but when I reboot the BIOS does the memory > > check, and all I get next is half a screenfull of "40's" printed out. > > they remain for a few seconds, then I just get a prompt that I can't do > > anything with. > > > > I am wondering if something has been left behind on the harddrive from > > the Win 2000 install, that linux has not been able to remove. > > Almost certainly that is not the problem, > > You need to read the lilo documentation, it will probably explain to you > exactly what is wrong. > Cheers > John Thanks to Andy for the dd syntax, but sadly, although it cleared the start of the drive, I still couldn't get the Smoothwall to boot up post install, just an "L" followed by a string of 40's after the BIOS memory check. All a bit weird, as when I bought the machine about 4 years ago when I first started with computers, it had Win 98 on it, and that worked ok. I passed the machine onto my son, and he somehow got Win 2000 pro installed on it. I know that was booting ok, because I tried it. It got as far as wanting the password to get in, but as I don't know his password I couldn't progress further, but at least it was booting, so it doesn't seem to be a problem with booting from the harddrive. Could a failing cmos battery cause this sort of problem? I cycled down to town today, but forgot to buy a new one. John. Lilo is possibly the problem, but I can't see how to re-install it in the MBR. Saying that though, on the other machine where the Smoothwall is working ok, there is no problem, and I couldn't be posting this if lilo was screwed up. Perhaps the machine is just a piece of junk, and needs to be sent to the nearest dumpster, but I do like to try and resolve problems, before trashing what might be a useable machine. I booted up the problem machine with the Smoothwall installed on it using Finnix. Running fdisk -l showed the same output as ssh'ing into my smoothwall that's up and running, but couldn't find a way of chrooting into the Smoothwall partitions from Finnix. perhaps I'm a bit out of my depth. I was looking to rerun /sbin/lilo just to see if it hadn't been installed in the MBR, and maybe that was the problem which resulted in the "L", and half a screen of 40's when booting up. Perhaps I should just forget about the problem machine, and trying to install Smoothwall on it. My current running Smoothwall has settled down, and I can access the Internet from my Fedora, Debian, and other distros through it. Thanks for the help guys. Nigel.
