InsanelyMac Forum > Trouble with rEFIt and a botched LILO install

TraxusIV

Sep 10 2009, 12:50 AM

Cliché disclaimer: I know very little about linux.

Ok, that out of the way, I've been trying to get Linux installed (finally got OpenSUSE installed and running) and went the rEFIt route, since I also have 10.6, 10.5, xp and vista installed. It's on a mac pro, with the 10.6 taking up drive 1, xp and 10.5 taking up drive 2, and vista and OpenSUSE taking up drive 3.

My problem is that in the process of trying to get OpenSUSE installed, I tried to use the LILO bootloader. However, the OpenSUSE installer hung while installing the bootloader (at the 'saving bootloader configuration' message, if I recall), and I had to reboot. This resulted in a phantom OS showing up in my rEFIt menu, as a Legacy OS on disk 3 (I'm not sure which partition). Now, recognizing that I managed to get the install finished with GRUB, and that it works, and that I really don't want to wipe the whole drive and start over, do I have any options for figuring out where the hell this phantom OS detection is coming from? My best guess is that it's the LILO bootloader hiding somewhere. However, I tried finding it on my Vista partition, but couldn't find an /etc directory. So my next guess is that it might be on the EFI partition?

Is that plausible? How do I access the EFI partitions? I can't see them in linux (again, noob here), and can't even get them to show up in Disk Utility under 10.6.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

T

EDIT***
I suppose I ought to give some more info than my ramblings above, so here's some nice juicy terminal output:

CODE

Maximus-Corruptus:~ TraxusIV$ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *400.1 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:       Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP                365.5 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Linux Swap                         2.1 GB     disk0s3
   4:                        EFI                         32.2 GB    disk0s4
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *640.1 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Cavarian Collective     639.8 GB   disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Valley Of Sonorous M... 285.5 GB   disk2s2
   3:       Microsoft Basic Data NO NAME                 34.2 GB    disk2s3
Maximus-Corruptus:~ TraxusIV$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk0
Disk: /dev/disk0    geometry: 48641/255/63 [781422768 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
#: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE    0   0   1 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -     409638] <Unknown ID>
2: 07 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [    411648 -  713902511] HPFS/QNX/AUX
3: 82 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 714314160 -    4192965] Linux swap
*4: 83 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 718507126 -   62915608] Linux files*
Maximus-Corruptus:~ TraxusIV$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk1
Disk: /dev/disk1    geometry: 77825/255/63 [1250263728 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
#: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -     409639] <Unknown ID>
*2: AF 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [    409640 - 1249591904] HFS+
3: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
Maximus-Corruptus:~ TraxusIV$ sudo fdisk /dev/disk2
Disk: /dev/disk2    geometry: 38913/255/63 [625142448 sectors]
Signature: 0xAA55
         Starting       Ending
#: id  cyl  hd sec -  cyl  hd sec [     start -       size]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: EE 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [         1 -     409639] <Unknown ID>
2: AF 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [    409640 -  557580288] HFS+
*3: 0C 1023 254  63 - 1023 254  63 [ 558252072 -   66890336] Win95 FAT32L
4: 00    0   0   0 -    0   0   0 [         0 -          0] unused
Maximus-Corruptus:~ TraxusIV$

Now, in rEFIt, the phantom os seems to be on disk0 somewhere (again, not sure which partition).

vilpostus

Sep 10 2009, 01:34 AM

About EFI partition.
Normally it is not "seen" to Linux or even OS X. Though the "diskutil list" in OS X terminal will show you all disks installed together with the listing of partitions on each disk, with EFI partition among them. Any way you need to mount it manually in order to see what's there. If you by any chance make an EFI partition boot-able (don't do that in any case!), it will show up in suse.

Normally a boot loader such as GRUB or LILO uses MBR of a disk to write itself to (though may use the root partition of Linux). So there is no way for LILO to install itself to EFI partiiion (unless you did it manually with dd).

A GUID partition table (do I get you right - you use Mac?) do not uses MBR directly. But it is aware of it's existence. It also may be possible that some info from LILO is still there - even after the GRUB installation. If so the only way to fix it is write zeros to MBR and then reinstall GRUB to it. A would recommend to be extra careful when dealing with MBR. A wrong move can damage a partition table information, so the info be untouched but not visible to any OS. Be careful and everything will be OK.

Also it may be a rEFIt bug. I don't use it so don't know much about it.

EDIT:
I see a strange thing in output posted. Particular disk0s4. Usually there should be only one EFI partition per disk. A standard size of an EFI partition is ~200mb. The one on disk0s4 is 32Gb. Very strange... Though I may not know something about SnowLeo...

TraxusIV

Sep 10 2009, 11:37 AM

QUOTE (Das_Human @ Sep 9 2009, 09:34 PM)

About EFI partition.
Normally it is not "seen" to Linux or even OS X. Though the "diskutil list" in OS X terminal will show you all disks installed together with the listing of partitions on each disk, with EFI partition among them. Any way you need to mount it manually in order to see what's there. If you by any chance make an EFI partition boot-able (don't do that in any case!), it will show up in suse.

Normally a boot loader such as GRUB or LILO uses MBR of a disk to write itself to (though may use the root partition of Linux). So there is no way for LILO to install itself to EFI partiiion (unless you did it manually with dd).

A GUID partition table (do I get you right - you use Mac?) do not uses MBR directly. But it is aware of it's existence. It also may be possible that some info from LILO is still there - even after the GRUB installation. If so the only way to fix it is write zeros to MBR and then reinstall GRUB to it. A would recommend to be extra careful when dealing with MBR. A wrong move can damage a partition table information, so the info be untouched but not visible to any OS. Be careful and everything will be OK.

Also it may be a rEFIt bug. I don't use it so don't know much about it.

EDIT:
I see a strange thing in output posted. Particular disk0s4. Usually there should be only one EFI partition per disk. A standard size of an EFI partition is ~200mb. The one on disk0s4 is 32Gb. Very strange... Though I may not know something about SnowLeo...

Thanks for the quick reply Das.

disk0s4 is actually the linux ext3 boot/home partition that I set up when I got finally got suse installed. I'm not sure why it's showing up as EFI either, though it does seem to show up correctly in linux.

A little more explanation is in order, I think. disk0 is a 400 gb drive that I had been using as external backup with my Macbook Pro. When I got the Mac Pro about a week ago, I used bootcamp under Snow Leopard to install Vista to it (using all the space for Vista), and threw it inside one of my drive bays. Within the last couple days, I decided to put Linux on it, so I used the GParted Live CD to resize the Vista partition, and give myself a 32GB chunk behind it. Next I attempted to install OpenSUSE 64 to that chunk. This was the LILO install attempt that failed and caused the phantom to show up in rEFIt (which I had installed at some point earlier in the effort). Specifically, I had the OpenSUSE installer repartition just that 32GB chunk to have a 2GB swap partition, and a 30GB ext3 filespace. I changed the bootloader to LILO, and hit go. It froze up as it was installing the bootloader (for like 10 minutes), so I killed power, and tried again. Some other weirdness ensued (I got past it but Im not sure how, so I think it's irrelevant), and after using the GParted cd to kill the swap and file partitions, I finally got OpenSUSE installed using the GRUB bootloader (and created the current swap and file partitions in the same fashion as before). Now, I THOUGHT that I had selected the boot partition as the destination for the LILO in the first attempt, and I THOUGHT that should have been the ext3 partition that I had set up at the time. However, the fact that I repartitioned (oh, and I did also use fdisk -u to repair the MBR) that particular space, but the phantom is still lingering about, leads me to believe that it's hiding somewhere else entirely.

So I guess the best question to ask is, where does rEFIt look for bootloaders? Does it keep a record of bootloaders that it's seen, or does it always do a fresh scan every time (and does it scan the GPT, the MBR, or both)? If it is the case that the GPT is retaining info about the non-existant bootloader, how can I confirm this, and how, specifically, do I go about fixing it?

A last note: I did try to mount the EFI partition, and did a fdisk on it, and as best as I can tell, it is not even formatted. So I'm guessing that it's not the culprit here after all.

Thanks much,

T

vilpostus

Sep 10 2009, 02:03 PM

About EFI. Yes, you are correct about it. It will not mount unless formatted. I have it shown in linux not because it is set bootable (unfortunately I do make mistakes in statements), but because it is formatted and contains some files.

About linux partition shown as EFI http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c4s5_parted.html

And this to remove a legacy OS http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1198613

TraxusIV

Sep 10 2009, 04:02 PM

QUOTE (Das_Human @ Sep 10 2009, 10:03 AM)

About EFI. Yes, you are correct about it. It will not mount unless formatted. I have it shown in linux not because it is set bootable (unfortunately I do make mistakes in statements), but because it is formatted and contains some files.

About linux partition shown as EFI http://refit.sourceforge.net/doc/c4s5_parted.html

And this to remove a legacy OS http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1198613

I tried the trick in the second link, but it didn't fix the problem, so I'm guessing that it's not the MBR that's at fault here.

T

EDIT**
Ok, turns out the phantom was in the MBR of my Snow Leopard drive. Unfortunately, I accidentally repartitioned the Linux/Vista drive in the process of finding this out.

Anyway, problem is fixed, so now I think I'll start reinstalling vista and linux.

Thanks for the help!

vilpostus

Sep 10 2009, 08:44 PM

Welcome! MBR still a usual suspect