On Friday 23 May 2003 16:38, Barry Samuels wrote:

Can anyone tell me what the message means, why this should happen suddenly and can I do anything about it?

Well if you are getting this I am guessing that you have more than one physical drive in your system and I am assuming that "Volume ID" refers to the Hard Drive's firmware serial number.

What I am confused by is a. why do you have two the same and b. why do they both have such a suspicious number. AFAIK Both Partitions and Physical drives have serial numbers. I am not sure which Lilo is referring to here.

Do a hdparm -i /dev/hda or b or c or whatever is required for each of the physical drives on your system. If you're running SCSI then there should be a scsitool equiv to list all of the drive parameters. Do any of the drive serial numbers match the one reported in the error message...it may even be worth checking Removeable media drives here.

If there is a duplicate then that must have always been the case. based on the dodgy number quoted it looks like something somewhere is failing to read the correct number and defaulting to this. So maybe something has changed with Lilo and it performs some sort of sanity check on the serial numbers that it didn't before.

If you are getting duplicate numbers then maybe the device interface is not retrieving them correctly ?

All of the above is guesswork by the way, I have never heard of, seen or even thought about the possibility of this. So please mail the list back with what you find.

Wayne