On Thu Aug 10 2000 at 15:04, "Matt Marnell" wrote:
> Is this still the case? (I found this on a site dated 1996)
> It is VERY IMPORTANT that your Linux partition start before (below) the
> 1024th cylander, otherwise you will be unable to boot it (and that's not a
> good thing).
It depends on the BIOS. And in most cases -- especially older
motherboards -- it remains the case.
Some more recent BIOSes are now capable of loading boot sectors
from beyond cylinder 1024, but they aren't too common.
So, to be safe, aim to have a small (say, 8-10Mb) partition for
/boot/ within the first 1024 cylinders of the hard drive. That way,
you are guaranteed that when the system boots, the kernel and initrd
boot images are physically located (in /boot/) at the start of the
disk.
If you have / and /boot/ on a single large (say, 2Gb) partition, it
might boot initially (since /boot/vmlinuz is located below cyl
1024), but if another kernel is created for booting, there is no
guarantee that it's physical location will be reachable.
NB: when you run lilo to create a boot sector, it maps the physical
location (track/sector/cylinder) into the boot sector so that the
BIOS boot loader knows where to find it.
Also, very recent versions of lilo claim to be able to handle boot
images above cyl 1024, so this issue might go away very soon. (But
I suspect that, like memory-detection of >64Mb, the issue will not
disappear due to quirky hardware and BIOSes).
Cheers
Tony
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Tony Nugent <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Systems Administrator, RHCE
GrowZone OnLine (a project of) GrowZone Development Network
POBox 475 Toowoomba Oueensland Australia 4350 Ph: 07 4637 8322
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