Well, I installed knoppMyth r4 v2 onto my computer and everything appeared to go fine. At the end of the process it asked me to take out the cd and reboot.

However, after the reboot it goes through the normal process of showing my bios screen, my IDE devices, my PCI devices, BUT then it gets hung up after "Verifying DMI Pool Data..........."

Why won't it boot up? I have reinstalled about 5 more times and it hangs up after reboot in the same place everytime! I really want to get this thing working. If you have any ideas please let me know.

Thanks for your time,
-Derek

what happens after that line you said? does anything show up on the screen? li maybe or does it just go black? or does it reboot? or does some stuff scroll by then it goes black?

Once "Verifying DMI Pool Data..........." appears on the screen, it will just sit there. The screen doesn't go black, it will just stay at that point indefinately until I turn the machine off.

This might be an incredably dumb question, but do I need a program like "Lilo" installed on my computer before I try and install KnoppMyth?

Could this be why it is not booting on my machine?

I am new to anything involving Linux (as of yesterday)

Thanks,
Derek

This doesn't belong in Problems and Solutions.

"Verifying DMI Pool Data..........." is displayed before the systems starts to boot from the hard drive. Did you set you BIOS to boot from the hard drive after installing? Auto install should have installed LILO. If you did a manual install, did you change where LILO was to be installed. If you need to install LILO, search the forum. Instructions have be posted on doing this...

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

no you don't have to have lilo before you install knoppmyth the install is supposed to put lilo on your harddrive, although some people have experienced problems with a completely fresh harddrive. you may want to fdisk and format the drive with something else and try again.

Sorry Cecil, where do you want me to go

-Derek

I've already moved it.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I'm having the exact same thing happen. I had BootMagic and other OSes installed before I removed all my partitions with PartitionMagic. (Could this be a reason?)

I'll try reformatting to a FAT partition and then reinstalling everything again (and let KnoppMyth) delete my partitions for me. I didn't see the LILO threads you mentioned when I did a search.

Same thing, though--verifying DMI pool data and then . . . nothing at the point that the OS is supposed to load.

if you have a dos boot disk around boot off it and use fdisk /mbr. There is a way to do this in linux, but it escapes my mind right this second.

Any other ideas? I still can't get it to boot. Maybe I need to do a manual install, write lilo to the partition instead of the disk mbr and use another boot loader to load up my Linux partition from the MBR? I'm concerned since the install creates 4 primary partitions and that is the limit that the disk can support (I think). Can I create some of these partitions as logical drives inside an extended partition like you can do in the Windows world?

I tried fdisk /mbr from a Win98 boot disk. I got a message in all caps something like "insert system disk and then press enter" the next time I booted. I wiped my drive clean with killdisk, installed again, got the same problem, did fdisk /mbr, booted again and got "no system disk found" in small letters (not caps).

I booted off the CD, got to a prompt and messed with trying to get lilo to rewrite the MBR ("lilo -M /dev/hda mbr" or something), but it refused to do it and told me that hda was in read-only mode. I messed with chmod for a while, messed with mounting things, tried to get to a different user, but couldn't get it to log me in with the root password I supplied during installation.

I'm quite a bit of a newbie, but can get around a little bit--it doesn't seem like it should be this hard. Any other suggestions?

OK, I finally got my LILO to load correctly and my MythTV to boot. There might be an easier way, but this is what I did. I think the problem was caused by an invalid lilo.conf file and lilo never got written to the drive correctly with the autoinstall for me. It kept complaining about the first few lines when I tried to update it. It was a bit of a mess to get working.

Steps I took:

1. Install KnoppMyth.
2. When it doesn't boot after installing, boot off the CD and choose to exit to the prompt (quit at the menu).
3. Stick a formatted floppy in the floppy drive.
4. Mount the floppy or another DOS partition that you can copy your kernel to. Create a new directory for it like mkdir /myfloppy. Now mount /dev/fd0 /myfloppy.
5. Mount your KnoppMyth partition. mkdir /mypart. Now mount /dev/hda1 /mypart.
6. Find your vmlinuz file in the mounted partition for KnoppMyth. When you're in the same directory as it, type cp vmlinuz /myfloppy. I can't remember which directory it was in, but you can use the find command to find it if I remember correctly. It should copy it to your disk.
7. You now have your kernel on your floppy so you can use it from DOS/Win98 with loadlin. Shutdown linux (with shutdown command).
8. Make your floppy bootable from a DOS/Win9x system by typing SYS A: at a command prompt.
9. Download loadlin from whereever you can find it. Maybe check ftp://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/pub/linux/loadlin-1.6/. Get the .tgz file which winzip will open. Unzip it and copy the loadlin.exe and linux.bat files to your floppy disk.
10. Modify your linux.bat file on the floppy so that it shows the correct boot info for your partition and other things. Be sure to put the rw in place of the ro so that you can actually read and write to the linux partition when it boots it for you so you can correct the configuration file.
11. Boot off the floppy and type linux at the DOS prompt. It should finally boot your KnoppMyth partition. I think it misconfigured or did something weird with Myth when it went in. Push escape a bunch of times and exit to the X-Windows desktop.
12. Start xterm and then do su - root and type in your password. You finally got logged in so you can change things and edit the lilo and config files! For lilo.conf type chmod 777 /etc/lilo.conf. This makes this file readable/writeable/executable by anyone (or use vi to edit it if you can stand to). You can change this back later if you want to less generous permissions.
13. Make a backup copy of this file if you would like to before you edit it.
14. Type exit and you will be back to your non-root login. Now open this file by typing xedit. I had to comment out the first 2 or 3 lines that said things like drive: ... (I can't remember exactly). I also might have had to comment out the first line--I can't remember. Save the file.
15. Login as root again (see step 12) and type /sbin/lilo. If it went correctly it shouldn't have given you warning error messages (as it did before if you tried this already).
16. You can also rewrite the master boot record if needed. Type lilo --help to see the switches and parameters for doing this. I think the switch is -M.
17. Shut down linux and restart your system with your floppy not in the drive. If all has gone as planned, you should finally have a booting linux installation and lilo should finally work.

I hope this is helpful to someone since it took me 8+ hours over the last few days to figure this out (and after reinstalling and messing with things a lot). I think the lilo.conf file had errors and so it would not automatically install lilo with the autoinstall.

PS. Anyone know of a way to reset MythTV so that it gives you all the initial setup screens again? I think my settings are messed.

mythtv-setup?

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!