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I have a system that boots (using LILO) from an IDE (PATA) drive.

The system also has a Silicon Image SATA adapter. If I actually connect
any SATA drives to the card, LILO does not boot (still trying to boot off
the PATA drive). It gets as far as "LIL". The system will boot off a
rescue CD, although it did not make the SATA drives available (there were
a number of messages relating to the ata interface).

Does anyone have any clues on what might be wrong?

According to LILO's documentation, it could be a geometry problem, yet how
should this be affected by the presence of a SATA drive?

Whoever wrote:
> I have a system that boots (using LILO) from an IDE (PATA) drive.
>
> The system also has a Silicon Image SATA adapter. If I actually connect
> any SATA drives to the card, LILO does not boot (still trying to boot
> off the PATA drive). It gets as far as "LIL". The system will boot off a
> rescue CD, although it did not make the SATA drives available (there
> were a number of messages relating to the ata interface).
>
> Does anyone have any clues on what might be wrong?
>
> According to LILO's documentation, it could be a geometry problem, yet
> how should this be affected by the presence of a SATA drive?

Boot with the rescue CD, mount your system on the PATA and then chroot into
your system where after you reinstall lilo.

Not sure, but I image it will fix your troubles.



//Aho

On Sun, 19 Nov 2006, J.O. Aho wrote:

> Whoever wrote:
>> I have a system that boots (using LILO) from an IDE (PATA) drive.
>>
>> The system also has a Silicon Image SATA adapter. If I actually connect
>> any SATA drives to the card, LILO does not boot (still trying to boot off
>> the PATA drive). It gets as far as "LIL". The system will boot off a
>> rescue CD, although it did not make the SATA drives available (there were
>> a number of messages relating to the ata interface).
>>
>> Does anyone have any clues on what might be wrong?
>>
>> According to LILO's documentation, it could be a geometry problem, yet how
>> should this be affected by the presence of a SATA drive?
>
> Boot with the rescue CD, mount your system on the PATA and then chroot into
> your system where after you reinstall lilo.
>
> Not sure, but I image it will fix your troubles.

It's a good idea. I should have mentioned that I tried this already.

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.hardware.]
On Sun, 19 Nov 2006 13:14:04 -0800, Whoever staggered into the Black Sun
and said:
> On Sun, 19 Nov 2006, J.O. Aho wrote:
>> Whoever wrote:
>>> I have a system that boots (using LILO) from an IDE drive. The
>>> system also has a Silicon Image SATA adapter. If I actually connect
>>> any SATA drives to the card, LILO does not boot off the IDE drive.
>>> It gets as far as "LIL". The system will boot off a rescue CD,
>>> although it did not make the SATA drives available

It's not much of a rescue CD if it doesn't have proper SiS SATA support.
This is weird, but there's probably a solution somewhere. You mentioned
"error messages about the ATA subsystem" when you tried this rescue CD.
Can you reproduce those?

>>> According to LILO's documentation, it could be a geometry problem,
>>> yet how should this be affected by the presence of a SATA drive?

Strange things can happen when you have a mixed SATA/IDE system. On my
desktop, if the BIOS boot order is set to (IDE CD-ROM,SATA), GRUB sees
the SATA disk as (hd2). If the BIOS boot order is set to (SATA,IDE
CD-ROM), GRUB sees the SATA disk as (hd0). Have you tried using GRUB
instead? Its shell can be really useful when stupid things happen to
the bootloader config.

>> Boot with the rescue CD, mount your system on the PATA and then
>> chroot into your system where after you reinstall lilo. Not sure,
>> but I image it will fix your troubles.
> It's a good idea. I should have mentioned that I tried this already.

Yep. Always say what you tried, and how it failed; it prevents people
from covering already-covered ground.

--
Back in my day, all we had were 0's. We painted them different colors
to tell them apart. Once this started bogging the processes down, we
switched to naming them. I still miss Bob. --skritch on a.f.c (1998)
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see