[SOLVED] Repair booting AntiX-23

business_kid · 01-01-2024, 12:20 PM

I installed Antix as a spare OS on my elderly laptop. No backup exists, because I expected to format this, install some despicable OS and give it to some deserving soul who needed it, but was incapable of learning linux. I know a few of those. But that hasn't happened.

To make a long story short, I'm on MBR & lilo here with Slackware. AntiX has sda6, and shares sda1 (/boot) with Slackware. sda1 was hosed, which makes it hard to boot AntiX. I have the AntiX-23_x64.iso here.

So I found a likely looking kernel & initrd on the iso, put them in lilo, and tried booting. It halted for the lack of linuxfs

I can see linuxfs there, but it's 1.6 GB and very big for a ramdisk unless it's for the install procedure. AntiX is installed - I just want my kernel & initrd back.

colorpurple21859 · 01-01-2024, 12:26 PM

post the contents of sda1, and

Code:

sudo parted -l

business_kid · 01-01-2024, 01:48 PM

Code:

bash-5.2$ sudo parted -l /dev/sda
Model: ATA KINGSTON SV300S3 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 240GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End     Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      1049kB  525MB   524MB   primary   ext4            boot
 2      525MB   5894MB  5369MB  primary   linux-swap(v1)  swap
 3      5894MB  48.8GB  42.9GB  primary   ext4
 4      48.8GB  240GB   191GB   extended
 5      48.8GB  103GB   53.7GB  logical   ext4
 6      103GB   129GB   26.8GB  logical   ext4
 7      129GB   240GB   111GB   logical   ext4

bash-5.2$ ls /boot   
README.initrd@            boot_message.txt          elilo-ia32.efi*    initrd1.gz   onlyblue.bmp  vmlinuz@               vmlinuz1
System.map@               config@                   elilo-x86_64.efi*  inside.bmp   onlyblue.dat  vmlinuz-generic@
System.map-generic-6.6.8  config-generic-6.6.8.x64  grub/              inside.dat   slack.bmp     vmlinuz-generic-6.6.8
System.map-huge-6.6.8     config-huge-6.6.8.x64     initrd-tree/       lost+found/  tuxlogo.bmp   vmlinuz-huge@
boot.0800                 efi/                      initrd.gz          map          tuxlogo.dat   vmlinuz-huge-6.6.8
bash-5.2$

/boot is all slackware, except initrd1.gz and vmlinuz1, just to avoid name confusion with slackware. Taken from the iso antiX/ directory, antiX/vmlinuz (the bigger one) is now /boot/vmlinuz1. I tried them both.

yancek · 01-01-2024, 03:03 PM

Quote:

So I found a likely looking kernel & initrd on the iso, put them in lilo, and tried booting. It halted for the lack of linuxfs

I don't see how that could work as I don't believe lilo is capable of booting an iso file directly. Are you wanting to boot the AntiX iso or are you trying some way to rescue the install on sda6? If you want to use the AntiX iso, extract (loop mount) the AntiX iso to a directory and copy the entire contents of the directory to sda6 (overwriting everything there) or to another empty partition slightly larger than the iso file. The entry below will boot AntiX (the extracted iso) from sda6 using Grub2. Since you are familiar with lilo, I expect you should be able to convert it to boot from Lilo.

Quote:

menuentry "ANtiX" {
set root='hd0,6'
linux /antiX/vmlinuz quiet splash --
initrd /antiX/initrd.gz
}

The 'linuxfs' file is the compressed filesystem for AntiX and is used when booting the live system.

colorpurple21859 · 01-01-2024, 04:02 PM

Does Slackware boot? Did you use grub at one time as the bootloader and if so why did you switch to lilo?
Post the contents of /etc/elilo.conf
What is in the boot directory on sda6?
What is in /etc/fstab on sda6?

business_kid · 01-02-2024, 01:43 PM

SORTED!

I must confess to misleading the AntiX installer, because I want the main system to have mastery of the boot loader, and each distro thinks they are in charge. Not only that, but each distro don't know about the other ones. So there's mayhem regularly on updates. AntiX wasn't told about the /boot partition, so I had a /boot directory in AntiX's root drive with everything there. So I just copied over to sda1 again, and everything works.

Sorry for not getting my brains in gear a little earlier on this. The tricky bit was that lilo.conf is new, because grub got wiped out as well.