Daniel,
IIRC I have managed to boot without problems from /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc
etc.
Unless someone introduced a new limitation into lilo! Anyway, here are a
few
ideas.
1. The primary "slot"? I think you mean first IDE slot, no? In that
case,
you want to wire your disk as primary for the second IDE slot. This is
called /dev/hdc. I have booted REALLY old PCs from /dev/hdc with lilo.
Make sure your BIOS can boot from the second slot (may require tweaking
in the BIOS setup screens).
boot=/dev/hdc
NB, to change fstab to reflect this, boot from a CD, mount the root
partition and edit fstab.
2. The bios=0x80 trick is VERY chicken and egg. Try above first.
3. If you (eventually) fall back on a floppy boot, an interesting idea
(that works) is to write the boot sector to a partition and not to the
MBR. use boot=/dev/hdc5. Now, strip this boot sector directly onto a
floppy, like this:
dd if=/dev/hdc5 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
Now, the ONLY thing that is read from the floppy is the boot sector.
Everything else comes from the hard disk, so there's almost no speed
penalty for booting from the floppy :-)
You can use this trick to try lots of different lilo configurations
without affecting your hard disk. Once you get it to work, strip the
boot sector back to the MBR with
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hdc bs=512 count=1
You can even put boot=/dev/fd0 if you just want to experiment ..
4. Don't forget the 1024 cylinder limitation! Old BIOSes won't boot
beyond this even if you do have the latest lilo. Make a tiny /boot
partition that lies completely within 1024 cylinders, and boot from
there.
5. Partition Magic 5.0 CAN partition 30 GB. Tried and Tested by yours
truly. If you have a problem it may be BIOS related - try partitioning
the disk on a different machine, and return it to your target machine
when your finished.
> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 20:54:07 +0200
> From: Daniel Feiglin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Two system problems
>
> Hi folks!
<snip>
> 2. One of the "junk" systems I put together, has a P166 + 32Mb and a "dafuk" IDE
> primary slot (The machine originally had Win 95 on a 2Gb drive which booted OK
> from the the second IDE slot.) With Linux, I can only boot off a floppy, since
> lilo won't allow an IDE hard disk boot from anthing other than
> /dev/hda<something>. Upon examining the lilo.conf man page I found all sorts of
> interesting tricks for remapping the IDE drive ID's: e.g.
> disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x80
> or
> map-drive=0x82 to=0x80
>
> My root device is /dev/hdc5, and I boot from on /dev/fd0. I would like to use
> the above disk= ... mapping. I modified lilo.conf to root, /dev/hda5, boot from
> /dev/hda2 and put the boot sector on /dev/hda MBR. I also modified fstab to
> reflect the new arrangement. Of coure lilo failed, because the new arrangements
> are meaningless until I reboot, which I cannot do! What to do?
>
> Thanks to the people who supplied the "junk". I'm still looking for Pentium
> stuff, MB with slot 7 or better.
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Dan Feiglin
>
>
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