[LI] LILO and fdisk /mbr

[Gandalf Mithrandir <gandalf@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Folks,

With all the talk on Lilo and fdisk I thot I'd share a most odd experience
with everyone on LI. Sorry for the slightly long mail. I was setting up a
<relatively> old P-133, 48 MB RAM machine via the PCQ 6.1 CD. Well, this
machine was the only machine that had completely configured itself <monitor,
card etc etc> via my oldest RH5.2 Cd - so I assumed it would be a breeze
this time around.
Well, the lady in question is gonna use it for pgming,so I chose a KDE
workstation. It works out to approx 574MB. Used disk druid, removed older
partitions, created new ones. Ok. So lef t the machine alone when
installing. Now the fun started. The damm thing took 1 hour 42 minutes to
reach till the end. Does anyone have any timings on how long their P133
(pref. 48MB) took to install in graphics mode around 574MB? Any ideas on why
it is taking so long? I remember the 5.2 install <again approx 500MB> going
pretty quick!
Ok, it reached z??-devel-libs <the last package>. It showed me 3 MB left to
install. And got stuck there. I waited for some 10min, no change. CD and HDD
lights off. Whatzup? In later discussion, Chetu suggests bad media. Any
takers? Since I was stuck - I rebooted. Gulp. Faced an neat little LI on
boot up. Since I'd been so overconfident, I didn't even create a rescue
disk.
Finally booted back up into Win95 and did a fdisk /mbr. Now everything
recovered perfectly. I rebooted and everything seemed ok. It loaded etc. For
one whole day the machine worked perfectly. Apparently, the next day there
was a power fluctuation and the power stabilizer cut off power for a spike.
So the machine was virtually switched off and on almost immediately.
Now's the surprise. When it booted up, there was LI again. Where did that
come from? Where was it stored? What was / is / will happen? I thought that
an fdisk /mbr removed all traces of LILO from the MBR. Then what happened
here? Fluke? I sure hope so.... feels most odd for something like this to
happen.

ReSourcefully,
M

    Gandalf Mithrandir   /* "Mobilis in mobile." */   gandalf@xxxxxxxxx
/*   Any Sufficiently Advanced Operating System is indistinguishable from Linux   */ 
// Do not meddle with SysAds for they are quick to anger and subtle in their ways //

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