LILO!!!

Ok, so this is what you get for not looking at what programs are updated when you type “pacman -Syu”… I failed to observe that Lilo was updated, so after switching off at night I couldn’t turn back on in the morning!

So my computer fires up, and I get the ever pleasant (not!) lilo screen… fine… (side note: I do actually like lilo over grub, but that’s because I don’t really get grub…) Next: I’m presented with this error message:

EBDA is big; kernel setup stack overlaps LILO second stage

Don’t ask me what that means… BUT I can tell you how to solve it in a few easy steps.

Basically all you need to do is reinstall lilo, which is pretty simple. You need some sort of live disk… most people would opt for Knoppix or an Ubuntu CD or something like that. I actually used an old Slackware 11 install DVD because I find that it’s one of the quickest ways of booting to a command line where I can do my dirty work and get out again.

Once you have a CLI you follow these steps:

• mount /dev/sda1 /mnt –> this mounts the root partition in the current file system. (it’s likely to be a different for anyone elses computer… sda1 just means that it is the first partition on a serial drive (SATA in this instance))
• mount –bind /dev /mnt/dev –> this will place the file system’s /dev directory in the place of the /dev on the mounted partition, which is necessary because the /dev directory is dynamically created on boot up with anything older than a 2.6 kernel… without this line you will receive this error: ‘Fatal: raid_setup: stat(“/dev/sda”)’ which means that it can’t find your disk on the file system…
• chroot /mnt /bin/bash –> this turns the mounted partition into the active file system and selects the bash shell
• I didn’t need to edit lilo.conf, but if this problem has occurred due to a change in kernel then it might be necessary for others
• /sbin/lilo -v –> reinstall lilo (verbose mode)
• exit –> end the chroot session
• reboot

Job done!