What has changed with Knoppmyth and LILO over the last year?
I've noted 2 differences and wonder if they are the cause of not being able to reload/fix LILO any more.

Back in R5C7:
- the boot partition was ext2.
- the version of LILO was different (22.6.1, I believe) than it is now in R5F1

Now in R5F1:
- the boot partition is ext3.
- there is now a newer version of LILO (22.7.3, I believe)

Are either of these a critical difference?

A year ago, I used this code below to fix LILO after using Ghost 2003 to copy a small R5C7 Knoppmyth boot drive to a bigger hard drive. With R5F1, it doesn't work. (details follow)

At present, I am using the R5F1 Knoppmyth live cd to boot the pc and to get a command line to type the commands shown above. (I let the live cd boot to the install menu and then QUIT to a command line.)

After the attempt to fix LILO, I reboot the machine, LILO starts to run and then I and get a message that the drive is mounted read-only. There is also an error saying that "/proc/partitions does not exist, disk scan bypassed". The boot process is halted right there.

Is there a new method of fixing LILO and getting hda1 to be a read-write file system?

I Googled the net for a different mount command and found the following version of the mount command, which seems specific to the ext3 file system:


I have tried this and still get the read-only boot partition with the error message at boot.

Can one of the LILO gurus try reloading/fixing LILO and see what is necessary to accomplish this with R5F1, ext3, and the current version of LILO?

Help appreciated!
Eric

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

With some information from a friend who is most familiar with Red Hat Linux, I got it solved.

My previous cloning experience was a year ago with KM R5C7 - ext2 file system on the boot partition. At that time, Ghost 2003 did a fine job of cloning the boot hard drive with no issues. One theory is that Ghost treats ext2 partitions differently than ext3 partitions - it knows how to deal with ext2 partitions and not with ext3 partitions?

My friend told me that he thought that Ghost marks the Linux clone drive as unchecked, so you need to do an 'fsck' to the clone drive before you mount it, chroot into it and rerun LILO. He said that when LILO sees an unchecked drive, it mounts it as read-only until it has been checked by 'fsck'. That would explain why the boot partition was mounted as read-only.
This must only be true for ext3 partitions, because I never had to use fsck a year ago.

In the interest of fixing my KM box FAST, I also decided to try a different cloning solution - in case Ghost 2003 and ext3 was an unsolvable problem. I bought Acronis True Image 10 today and used that to re-clone my KM boot drive onto the destination drive. It worked.

So at this point, I'm not 100% sure which idea made the clone process work, but I am relieved that it did work.

To detail what I did:
1. Used Acronis True Image 10 to clone the failing 60GB KM boot hard drive over to a 20GB hard drive.
2. Removed the failing boot hard drive from the ribbon cables and set it aside.
3. Booted the pc with the R5F1 boot cd and used option 7 to quit to a command line.
4. Entered the following commands:

5. removed the R5F1 cd from the drive and hit RETURN for the reboot

After that, Knoppmyth booted up without any problems - like nothing had happened!

Now, that I've got it working, I'll have to try and clone the boot drive to another drive using Ghost 2003 and see if I can make the process work with Ghost. If I can, we'll know that the 'fsck.ext3 -f /dev/hda1' command did the trick and that Acronis True Image 10 didn't have much to do with the solution.

Best wishes!
Eric

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

Why did you use Norton Ghost or acronis and not something simple like rsync?

What's rsync? Is it hard drive cloning software with a GUI?

I like to use tools that have a GUI, are intuitive to use and have been proven to work. Ghost has an easy-to-understand interface and has been proven to work very well for hard disc cloning - even when your source and destination hard drives aren't the same size. It's a CLICK-CLICK-DONE type of tool. In the past, Ghost has worked on Knoppmyth boot drives, so there was no reason to think it wouldn't continue to work. I didn't know that the change from ext2 to ext3 partitions would be a problem.

Until I perform a few more experiments, I'm not sure if the current disc clone success was due to Acronis or due to running the fsck utility before restoring LILO. In either case, it's not a bad idea to do an fsck, so I will just add that to my list of steps when cloning a Linux hard drive.

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

It's a smart recursive copy with remote capabilities. For example I use this command to clone my whole /myth partition onto the backup drive.

It's smart enough to only copy the things that have been added, removed, or changed, and by specifying the hostname for the source or destination can be used to do the same between machines.

rsync sounds useful for backups of data from a working system.

I make fully bootable clones of operating system hard drives - usually in emergency backup situations.
To date, only Ghost and Acronis have proven themselves to me.
Their high points:
- runs from a bootable CD
- GUI interface, with mouse support (click-click-DONE)
- can resize a drive partition as it clones it
- clones both Linux and Windows file systems
- makes fully-bootable clone of source hard drive

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner

That's nice if you have it lying around, but the boot CD already has rsync on it, and dd, and ...

My point was that it's good to have at least basic knowledge of how to use the tools that are already to hand. Even if you just know that they're there and how to read a man page.

BTW - Probably the single most useful Unix skill I've ever learned was how to read man pages and understand what they're telling you.

Well, I just did my final experiment. I cloned my Knoppmyth R5F1 boot drive with Ghost 2003. I tried to perform the same fsck and LILO fix quoted above and it does not work. Right at the fsck step, you hit problems.
My hunch is that Ghost 2003 simply can't deal with the journaling of ext3 partitions.
So, bye-bye Ghost 2003. Hello, Acronis True Image 10!

_________________
KnoppMyth R5.5, Asus A8N-VM CSM (nvidia 6150 onboard video), AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 4200+, two 1GB sticks DDR 400, HD-3000 HDTV card, PVR-150 card, Iguanaworks RS-232 IR receiver/transmitter, Pioneer DVR-110 DVD burner