Mandrake 9.1 upgrade (from 8.2) problems

[jichikawa]

Hello,

I'm looking for suggestions for the following problem:

I tried to upgrade from Mandrake 8.2 to 9.1 and now cannot boot up - I get "LI" showing up on my screen.

My system is set up as a dual boot (hda: Mandrake 8.2, now 9.1; hdb: win98se)

Here's what I did during the upgrade:

1. downloaded the 3 ISO CDs of Mandrake 9.1
2. changed setup (modified BIOS?) to allow boot from CD
3. booted from CD1 and stepped through Mandrake upgrade procedure (chose upgrade option, not install.)
- note: for some reason it did not recognize CD2 and CD3 when it asked for them, so I hit "cancel"
4. reboot, got the "LI"

Here is what I have tried so far:

1. Use Mandrake rescue / restore bootloader option:
a. boot from Mandrake CD1, hit F1 and enter rescue
b. selected "restore bootloader" option, it gives me something like the following message:

found Mandrake root partition on /dev/hda1 type ext3, version Mandrake 9.1 for i586
mounting other partitions from fstab on /mnt ...
/dev/hda6 on /mnt/home type ext3
/dev/hdb1 on /mnt/mnt/windows type vfat
your system is ready on /mnt

c. when I hit enter to restore the bootloader I got this error message:
Fatal: open /dev/hda: No such file or directory

2. Use Mandrake rescue / console, try to manually restore lilo.conf:
a. boot from Mandrake CD1, hit F1 and enter rescue
b. select "console" option
c. when I look around the directories, I can't find /etc/lilo.conf or /sbin/lilo.

I thought I could type in a new lilo.conf myself using examples I'd seen in other threads, but my understanding is afterwards I have to run /sbin/lilo, which apparently isn't there.

So now I'm out of ideas. My guess is that during the Mandrake upgrade it wiped out my lilo.conf. I don't see it or /sbin/lilo when in rescue/console mode, which makes me question my understanding of rescue mode. Am I really looking at my hard drive, or something else?

If anyone has suggestions or ideas, please let me know. As you can probably tell my understanding of all this is very limited so I may have left out details, please let me know if this is the case.

Thanks!

[barneyt]

I think that you'll need to re-install your Linux. You need to use all of the CDs for the upgrade............. The final configurations are done once all of the packages on the CDs are installed.

Why the 2nd and 3rd disks were not recognized are a mystery. Maybe they were not burned properly (just a thought...).

Anyway, re-install would be my guess since the upgrade is not complete.

Barney

[jichikawa]

barneyt, thanks for the suggestion.

I realized that CD2 must have been burned incorrectly (looks like I must have burned it as audio format, oops) so I re-burned it from the ISO. When I tried the upgrade procedure again, it recognized CD2 correctly, finished the upgrade process, but still gave me the same "LI" error when I tried to reboot.

Finally I decided to do an install (not an upgrade) and this finally seemed to work.

[barneyt]

Excellent work! Sometimes, a clean install is what works best (like most of the time.... LOL! ) Now you are up and running!

Barney T.