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Compact Flash boot failure after many successful reboots.

I am working on a strange problem that is showing up on one of my embedded projects. The board is based on the ZF Micro X86 processer. The compact flash is connected via the IDE bus from the ZF Micro part. I'm running a 2.4.18 Kernel with a lilo boot loader (22.1). This device comunicates via a GPRS modem using ppp. Quite often the GPRS modem get out of whack and a system reboot is the cleanest way to get things working again.

What I have run across is lilo giving out after many reboots. We haven't loaded any new software. Nothing in /boot has moved. A re-running lilo will "fix" the problem, BUT, returning the device and removing the CF card and mounting it on a linux box...is Not a good solution. lilo prints the LI of the LILO startup and stops.

Does anybody know what may be going on? or any tools to find which of the master boot record, boot.b, or map are out of sync? Any ideas would be appreciated.

Reply to
Mike_BMW
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It means that lilo or system writes something to flash. You should check if lilo if configured without write feature, and also system should be installed on readonly partition. I hope, you know, that CF has only limited number of rewrites(100k-1M), after which you can only buy a new one. If you need to have writable partition you should mount it with 'noatime', otherwise you can kill CF in very short time.

To check what was changed, just copy boot sector, or all CF before inserting, and compare with CF after failure. (man dd, man cmp).

good luck Jarek

Reply to
Jarek

Thanks, I got it figured out. Someone removed the %post install portion of the lilo RPM. When the system was updated with a new lilo release, the systems MBR wasn't written with the new boot.b location information. This left the MBR pointing to the old deleted boot.b which worked fine until it's data location was over written. -Mike

Reply to
Mike_BMW

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