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Problems After Installing Linux

You've spent an entire afternoon installing Linux. In order to make space for it, you wiped your Windows and OS/2 partitions and tearfully deleted your copies of SimCity 2000 and Railroad Tycoon 2. You reboot the system and nothing happens. Or, even worse, something happens, but it's not what should happen. What do you do?

In "Problems with Booting the Installation Medium," earlier in this chapter, we covered the most common problems that can occur when booting the Linux installation medium; many of those problems may apply here. In addition, you may be a victim of one of the following maladies.

Problems booting Linux from floppy

If you are using a floppy to boot Linux, you may need to specify the location of your Linux root partition at boot time. This is especially true if you are using the original installation floppy itself and not a custom boot floppy created during installation.

While booting the floppy, hold down the Shift or Ctrl key. This should present you with a boot menu; press Tab to see a list of available options. For example, many distributions allow you to boot from a floppy by entering:

boot: linux root=partition

at the boot menu, where partition is the name of the Linux root partition, such as /dev/hda2. SUSE Linux offers a menu entry early in the installation program that boots your newly created Linux system from the installation boot floppy. Consult the documentation for your distribution for details.

Problems booting Linux from the hard drive

If you opted to install LILO instead of creating a boot floppy, you should be able to boot Linux from the hard drive. However, the automated LILO installation procedure used by many distributions is not always perfect. It may make incorrect assumptions about your partition layout, in which case you need to reinstall LILO to get everything right. Installing LILO is covered in "Using GRUB" in Chapter 17.

Here are some common problems:

System reports "Drive not bootable — Please insert system disk"

You will get this error message if the hard drive's master boot record is corrupt in some way. In most cases, it's harmless, and everything else on your drive is still intact. There are several ways around this:

While partitioning your drive using fdisk , you may have deleted the partition that was marked as "active." Windows and other operating systems attempt to boot the "active" partition at boot time (Linux, in general, pays no attention to whether the partition is "active," but the Master Boot Records installed by some distributions like Debian do). You may be able to boot MS-DOS from floppy and run fdisk to set the active flag on your MS-DOS partition, and all will be well.

Another command to try (with MS-DOS 5.0 and higher, including Windows 95/98/ME) is: FDISK /MBR

This command will attempt to rebuild the hard drive master boot record for booting Windows, overwriting LILO . If you no longer have Windows on your hard drive, you'll need to boot Linux from floppy and attempt to install LILO later. This command does not exist on Windows NT/2000/XP; here the procedure is more involved.

If you created a Windows partition using Linux's version of fdisk, or vice versa, you may get this error. You should create Windows partitions only by using Windows' version of fdisk. (The same applies to operating systems other than Windows.) The best solution here is either to start from scratch and repartition the drive correctly, or to merely delete and re-create the offending partitions using the correct version of fdisk.

The LILO installation procedure may have failed. In this case, you should boot either from your Linux boot floppy (if you have one) or from the original installation medium. Either of these should provide options for specifying the Linux root partition to use when booting. At boot time, hold down the Shift or Ctrl key and press Tab from the boot menu for a list of options.

When you boot the system from the hard drive, Windows (or another operating