Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 19654
LILO reports misleading error when /boot/message has size 0
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:29:28 EDT
Although LILO worked just fine when I installed RH 7.0 out of the box, I upgraded LILO on another machine (running RH 6.2) to the same version as RH 7.0. It is on this other machine that I noticed the problem. The problem is that if you don't have a file called 'message' in the /boot directory (as would be expected when you ipgrade LILO) AND you inadvertently create a file named /boot/message with nothing in it (e. g. using 'touch', which I did), then any attempt to run LILO will give you an "Empty Image" error message. This is very frustrating because it says nothing about where the error is coming from. I tracked down the error in the source and it seems to come from the file that actually writes to the boot sector when it notices that a block to be written has size 0. The obvious fix would be to have the calling program notice that the message file is empty (not the same as a message file containing the single character '\0') and refrain from writing the block in question.
equally irritating is this self contradicting output seen on 7.1 and caused by a typo in the default= line which rendered it invalid (i.e. not pointing to a valid image): [root@chesire /boot]# lilo Added linux-243-12smp Added linux-242-2smp Added linux-242-2 Added win2k Fatal: No images have been defined.
Not going to fix these as we've switched to grub as our default bootloader only leaving lilo as a fallback for a few cases that grub doesn't work as well with yet