Tomsrbt boot floppy disk LILO error

[tbodine88]

Hello

I am trying to resurrect an old computer. It can only boot off floppies.

I have another computer with a working floppy drive. I downloaded tomsrbt Tomsrbt web site, (has scrolling Text)image.
When I write it to a disk formatted to 1.722 mb, I can read it from Linux, but when I try booting
Lilo shows "LIL", then stops.

When I try reading the disk from MS-DOS, it can't be read since DOS doesn't support this density.

I am thinking, that LILO starts, but tries reading the rest of the disk as 1.44MB instead of 1.722 MB.

Back in the day, I remember loading linux from two floppies. A Boot Disk and then a USR disk.

Is there such a distribution still available? Many of the websites concerning old distros seem to be defunct.

 

[NorthWest]

From my notes of about 1998: LIL means: "The second stage boot loader has been started, but it can't load the descriptor table from the map file. This is typically caused by a media failure or by a geometry mismatch."

Lilo creates the map file: map=/boot/map, so the normal user can't readily create it themselves other than reinstall lilo. The other suggestion is about media failure, which wasn't uncommon on floppies, so you could try a few floppy writes to see if it's that. If they all fail the same way, it's likely the map file.

 

[dos2unix]

LILO, wow there's something I have completely forgotten about. Is that still around?

I know someone who burned the enire Archbang distro to a floppy.

ArchBang - Browse /ArchBang at SourceForge.net

ArchBang is a simple live Archlinux based distribution using Openbox window manager. Website/Blog www.archbang.org

sourceforge.net

Once it's installed you can format other floppies and move file systems around.
The other possibility.... a CD-ROM, maybe you have IDE or SATA ports?

 

[NorthWest]

dos2unix wrote:

LILO, wow

Slackware uses LILO. It may even be their default.

 

[dos2unix]

Slackware uses LILO. It may even be their default.

Yeah, that's what I remember it from. Back in the early 90's.
But I just looked this up just now... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LILO_(boot_loader)
It seems the last version was 2015, 7 years ago.

 

[captain-sensible]

LILO, wow there's something I have completely forgotten about. Is that still around?

The latest Slackware 15 is still using Lilo I believe; i have the new iso but haven't another PC to install yet