On a pentium 400mh system with 256 of memony and a 10 gig hard drive, I used Knoppmyth-4 to reformat hda and performed an auto install. No obvious problems except that the system will not reboot.

Any ideas?

Tom

what do you mean it won't reboot? won't power down won't come up?

The machine will not reboot. The bios screen comes up and does it's thing but the operating system does not come up. In a windows system i would think that it was defective mbr.

I was able to get in with the knoppmyth cd and was able to get up a terminal window so there is an operating system on the hard drive.

Tom

If the MBR is defective, then when the install was done most like LILO wasn't installed to the MBR. Why install anything on something you is defective? If you did get KnoppMyth install, you're not going to fulling enjoy the set-top box experience on a "Pentium 400".

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

the mbr wasn't defective before I installed knoppixmyth.

if you have a dos bootdisk do an fdisk /mbr and try the install agian. That's probably the easiest if you are not familiar with linux.

Since this is now a linux machine, how would I do the repair in Linux?

well you would have to boot off the cd and then chroot and run lilo. I can't remember how to do this off the top of my head.

Boot off the CD.
Select option 6 to quit.
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
chroot /mnt/hda1
lilo -v
exit
umount /mnt/hda1
reboot

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Lilo was the problem. It "seems" that in the initial installation /boot/map was not set up. Repairing lilo fixed the problem.

Thank you.

Tom

You're welcome!

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I had this same problem after doing an autoinstall. When I ran lilo -v (as instructed, after doing the chroot) I got the following error message:
Unrecognized token "part:" at or above line 2 in file '/etc/lilo.conf'

When I investigated I discovered 2 lines at the top of that file that I do not think belong:
vga=791
part: /dev/sda1, typ: 7

I commented them both out and reran lilo -v. This time it worked properly. When I rebooted, LILO presented me with 2 options:
Linux
WinNT (sda1)

I find this curious since this is an ide drive, and the only one in the system. Furthermore it does not contain winnt (or 2000, etc). I cleared off the drive both with linux fdisk and by doing fdisk /mbr from a win 98 boot disk.

In any case, the system works properly when selecting the Linux boot option. I haven't tried selecting the WinNT option, but I can't imagine positive results here

Just thought I would share this in case others run into a similar situation. I would be glad to provide more details on my hardware, etc. if there is interest from the developer in tracking down what might have happened here.

that worked for me, i had to do the exact some removal of the exact same lines to lilo.conf though i'm still not able to run mythtv, i guess its hte same problems with nvidia drivers, so i'll start searching for the answers on that.

thanks for the info on getting it to at least boot!

-replicant