RedHat 7.x, deleted boot.b

[Psycho]

Hello all,

I feel like such a MORON!

I created boot problems after upgrading to the 2.4.9-13-i868 kernel. Grub don't seem to be able to deal with my usb keyboard so I attempted to switch back to lilo. This caused the LI.. hang booting from the hard drive, so I was trying to correct that because using a boot floppy is a drag ...

I got distracted and accidently deleted boot.b. It sounds like lilo creates the boot.b from what I can find but using lilo -i /boot/boot.b trying to create a new image complains that it can't open boot.b.

I am continuing to try to hit on the incantation to get lilo to make boot.b...

Does anyone know how to do that w/o reinstalling?
Yeah, I know restore it from a backup...
Didn't think to back up /boot :(

tia, glenn

[DMR]

Just a thought, but you might try this:

-To be on the safe side, make a backup copy of /etc/lilo.conf.

-Do "lilo -u" to uninstall lilo. I don't think that this will delete lilo.conf, but that's where the backup comes in.

- re-run lilo ("/sbin/lilo").

It should reinstall itself by reading the parameters in lilo.conf, which could force it to regenerate /boot/boot.b (which, BTW, is just a symlink to boot-menu.b). I haven't tried this, so the obvious disclaimers apply.

[Psycho]

DMR,

Thanks for the idea, but I've been there, tried that. I had deleted the boot.b.032 or whatever it was. The -u or -U wants that to go back a version.

I have created an empty boot.b too, trying to give it a place to 'merge' the changes. Apparently boot.b is(was) a real file in RH 7.2, there was no boot-menu.b

Thanks, glenn

[Linuxcool]

lilo -u restores the boot sector from a file named ' boot.xxx '. The ' xxx ' refers to the major and minor numbers of the device and partition lilo is installed on. If it's ' boot.300 ', then it's installed on /dev/hda in the mbr. ' boot.301 ' would be /dev/hda1 and it would be in hda1's boot sector.

' boot.b ' is a file that is installed when lilo is installed. Try installing lilo again. Actually, you probably only have to ' update ' it. ' boot.b ' is listed in lilo's rpm. When lilo is run, it makes changes to ' boot.b '.