That sort of error almost always indicates that the BIOS geometry settings
for the hard drive are not the same as the geometry (Cylinders, Heads,
Sectors) configuration that was used when the drive was partitioned and a
file system put on it. For example: many IDE drives have 3 or 4 possible
configurations that they could be set up in the BIOS as. That being said,
I have run into two occasions that I had a drive with geometry settings
that would NOT work with my BIOS. (Once the drive was larger than the
largest size supported by the BIOS, the other time it was on an old 386
that only had pre-defined geometry settings and would not allow the user to
specify custom settings.)
In both cases, since the BIOS was not seeing the correct geometry settings,
I just told the BIOS that there was no hard drive. In both cases, I had
to have some other boot device (floppy, LS120, ROM on the network card,
CR-ROM) specified in the BIOS. Linux itself will see hard drives, even if
they are not specified in the BIOS, and see the drive with the proper
geometry parameters. (As near as I can tell, the only reason the BIOS needs
to be able to "see" the hard drive is so it can use it as a boot device...
and of course less robust/mature OS's than Linux rely on the BIOS settings
instead of querying the hard drive controller to see what's REALLY there.)
I realize that this is all IDE hard drive based advice/ramblings, but
hopefully some of it will help.
- M.S.
Pete <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>@waste.org on 08/22/2001 09:01:53 AM
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
cc:
Subject: Sandisk boot problems
Hello everyone,
I've been trying (and failing) to get linux booting
off of a 16 meg san disk card. (It's recognized by the
bios as a SunDisk.)
I'm using lilo, and if I tell it to use lba32, when
booting, I see a L followed by 02 02 02...
If I turn off lba32 all I get is an L.
I fdisked and formatted the card with an ext2
filesystem.
Any ideas what this is indicative of?
My lilo.conf:
boot=/dev/hdc
root=/dev/hdc
install=/mnt/boot/boot.b
vga=normal
image=/mnt/boot/vmLinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hdc1
read-only
This sandisk came out of a Siemens PC, and it had
linux on it at one time, it was sold as a 'net'
workstation, so I know that the card was able to boot
it at one time.
Thanks for any help, regards,
-Pete
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