From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) The disk Redhat 7.0 was being installed on was given the 'hdb' label instead of 'hda'. A CD-rom was also attached with the same cable which is why it was not chosen as the first disk. At the end of the installation procedure, Redhat ran lilo and then rebooted. The only problem was that lilo failed because it was being installed on the second disk. Instead of Redhat noticing that lilo failed, and at least giving the user the option to edit lilo.conf, it blindly rebooted. Of course, upon rebooting, there was no boot loader installed, so Redhat did not boot. It took me a long time to finally get hdb booted as root, edit lilo.conf, and then run lilo myself. If I were given the option to edit lilo.conf just before Redhat rebooted, it would have saved hours of work. Therefore, it is my opinion that if lilo fails, the Redhad installer should consider this a SERIOUS problem and not reboot. In the best case, if the installer notices that lilo failed, it can give some sort of user friendly menu of possible problems it can try such as 1) installing on the second disk 2) installing past the 1024 cylinder boundary. At the very least, the installer should allow the user to modify lilo.conf to get lilo working before rebooting. If it blindly reboots the installer should know that Redhat will not boot and the user will be stuck. There is no point to reboot if the boot loader is not installed. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install Redhat on the second disk (hdb) OR install Redhat past the 1024 cylinder boundary 2. 3. Actual Results: Upon reboot, Redhat Linux didn't start. Expected Results: Upon reboot, Redhat Linux should have started.
We have added a screen when lilo fails, indicating the user should make a boot floppy (the next screen in the installer) so they can get into the installed system and fix the lilo.conf.