Description of Problem: I had previously had a working copy of RedHat 7.2 installed on a machine using Lilo (installed on sda MBR) as the boot loader. Wanting to try skipjack, I installed and reformatted the drive, not preserving anything. Mind you, I had forgotten I had installed lilo on MBR and not on sda1 when I set things up months ago. So anyway, I chose "grub" as it is now the recommended bootloader, and chose "install on first sector of boot partition (/dev/sda1 (mounted as /boot)). It seemed happy with that choice, and we trundled through the lengthy search for disk errors, loaded the three CDs, and an hour or so later, when it rebooted, there was the old lilo prompt! Ack! I could boot off the floppy, but didn't see an easy way to get it to show the Grub loaded installed on sda1 rather than the old MBR-loaded lilo. The "boot with DOS" was less than helpful, as I don't have MS-DOS, and when I downloaded Caldera's DR-DOS 7.03, it's fdisk program says it tried but failed to rewrite the MBR. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Skipjack Beta 2 - i386 How Reproducible: easily Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install 7.2 with lilo on /dev/sda MBR 2.Install 7.2.93 beta with Grub on /dev/sda1 Actual Results: I can only boot from floppy. Cannot get MBR to update, and doing "grub" updates only update the version installed on the boot sector of sda1 (which never gets run). Expected Results: I should have been presented with a warning _before_ the long (but futile) reformat and installation that my old bootloader left its dregs on the MBR, and either 1) been given a means to fix the MBR from within the installation program, or 2) been warned of the fact that installing GRUB (or lilo, for that matter) on sda1 rather than the MBR would be futile and result in a non-bootable system. Additional Information: I re-installed (with reformats and all) but this time pointed grub to install on the MBR. It all works as expected now, but it would have been nice to have been warned of this at the time of install. Had this been a real production machine instead of a test machine, I'd be cursing mightily...
This isn't really a lilo bug at all. It's argueably not a bug at all (and usually that's what we say). The deal is, on a fresh install instead of an upgrade, we don't know that there is lilo gunk on the MBR. However, as often as this particular problem has come up, I'm tempted to suggest that this be changed from a bug report to a RFE (Request For Enhancement) in anaconda and make it so that anaconda can detect exactly what is on the MBR of the boot drive during an install and warn you if the boot loader setup you have selected will result in an unbootable system. I'm changing the component to anaconda so that the proper people can reply to that suggestion.
Thank you; that would be great. Intuitively (to me, anyway), a "clean install" should result in a bootable system, regardless of how the components had been previously used. If the machine cannot make the system bootable, either some kind of warning saying "you better install on MBR instead of /sda1 because there's junk there now that won't let it boot", or better yet, just create a clean MBR (there are those of us who don't have a copy of MS-DOS floating around - and DR.DOS 7.03's fdisk didn't work).
That's why we clearly state in the help and on the screen that you need to install to the same place. Blowing away people's MBR without telling them is completely unacceptable because it makes it difficult/impossible to do multiple installs on the same machine or use alternate bootloaders not shipped in Red Hat Linux.