[ltp] LILO problems

[Tino Keitel]

On Wednesday, 14. March 2001 05:47, Jim Eberhardt wrote:
> Thanks for all your suggestions, they were quite helpful. I'm up and
> running again. Here's what happened.
>
> I reset the MBR using 'fdisk /mbr' in DOS, then rebooted using my rescue
> disk. I reran LILO and when I rebooted it started up in Win95 (?). I went
> back and looked at my lilo.conf and found I had set 'boot=/dev/hda2'
> instead of 'boot=/dev/hda'. A silly but subtle error. Changing that and
> rerunning LILO caused the system to boot up just fine.
>
> As an aside, I've of course heard of the 1024 limit for boot information on
> a hard disk. Showing my hardware ignorance, is this cylinders or sectors?
> The new 6.4 GB drive has (I believe) 867 cylinders, but has millions of
> sectors (per cfdisk). Putting all the boot info into the first 1024
> cylinders would be automatic, and near impossible for the first 1024
> sectors.

An old BIOS can't address cylinders higher than 1024. If you use the maximum 
values for heads (255) and sectors (63) you will get ~8 GB. You can see the 
settings of your hard drive if you type fdisk -l . That means if your hard 
drive is larger than 8 GB lilo can only access the first 8 GB (1024 
cylinders) of the hard drive since it uses the BIOS. In this case you have to 
ensure that the kernel resides completely on the first 8 GB. You can do this 
by creating a small /boot partition (5 MB) that is somewhere below the 1024 
cylinder limit, the rest of your linux partitions can use the whole hard 
drive. Recent BIOS and lilo versions can use the LBA address mode to access 
the whole hard drive without the 1024 cylinder limit.

Tino

> Thanks again for the help,
> Jim
>
> At 04:25 PM 3/13/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >On Tuesday 13 March 2001 04:15 pm, you wrote:
> >> You can alternately also boot via the emergency floppy you created.
> >>
> >> Then add lba32 argument to the lilo command line parms which i have seen
> >> fix the problem.
> >>
> >> ashokr
> >
> >i think this solution is MUCH better than mine...
> >I didn't realize that there was an option that you needed to enable.
> >
> >I also just realized that I did not explain why your stuff suddenly failed
> >now but worked before.  Proabably the kernel happened to reside below 1024
> >when you first installed, but now that you have installed other stuff and
> >have worked on the machine the new kernel happens to reside above 1024
> >
> >brad
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Brad Langhorst [mailto:brad@langhorst.com]
> >> Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 10:27 AM
> >> To: linux-thinkpad@www.bm-soft.com
> >> Subject: Re: [ltp] LILO problems
> >>
> >> On Monday 12 March 2001 07:12 pm, you wrote:
> >> > Hi,
> >> > Everything
> >> > was working fine until I tried to install a new kernel with LILO,
> >> > after which when I booted I would get the following:
> >> >
> >> > LIL-
> >>
> >> this sounds like an OLD bug in lilo...
> >> i remeber if the kernel was not below sector 1024 on the disk it would
> >> not load properly.  If you have partition magic you could try adding a
> >> small \boot partition at the beginning of your disk and move your
> >> kernels there.
> >>
> >> I still do this on my machines even though it is supposed to be fixed by
> >> now.
> >>
> >> good luck
> >>
> >> brad

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