Ray Olszewski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> I have NOT been able to get Linux to boot from an LS-120 disk. This seems to
> be a geometry problem -- Linux and the BIOS see different geometries, and
> this causes LILO to choke. I've seen reports that syslinux will work from an
> LS-120 but have not been able to replicate them. I've also seen reports that
> one can do a two-step boot process, booting from a regular floppy, then
> inserting an LS-120 disk to use as the root filesystem, but I have not tried
> to replicate that procedure.
>
Hmm. I've gotten an LS-120 to boot linux -- I can't say what
will work for anyone else, but it worked for me.
Step 1, use GRUB. It's a part of debian, but if you're using
another distribution, it's available from ftp://alpha.gnu.org
Step 2, install GRUB on the hard drive of your system. Reboot
the system.
In the BIOS I used, there were two options for the LS-120 --
treat it as a floppy, and treat it as a hard drive. If you
tell the bios to treat it as a floppy, the geometry is the
same as linux sees it(9xx/xx/x), but I couldn't get past grub.
Or treat it as a hard drive and that's what you want. Once you
treat it as a hard drive, boot from grub on your hard drive
and issue the command
grub>geometry (hd1)
hd1 if your *real* hard drive is the only hard drive in the
system, (hd2,3,4) whatever if you have others.
This geometry for me was 1xx/xx/x. Write this down. The first
number is cynliders, the second heads, and the third tracks.
Now bring the system up to linux and partition the ls-120 with
*cfdisk*. This is important. I had to use cfdisk, and it gets
worse. You have to tell cfdisk the geometry, and you have to
lie.
Take what you wrote down before
1xx/yy/zz -- right?
start cfdisk with
cfdisk -c (1xx + 1) -h (yy + 1) -s zz
so if it was 100/23/17, do
cfdisk -c 101 -h 24 -s 17
I kid you not.
Make a big partition, and put an ext2fs on it, install the
linux you want, and put grub as the bootloader.
This worked for me. Ray saw it. It seems loopy but it worked.
I used cfdisk 2.10f,
GNU GRUB 0.5.95, and
mke2fs 1.18
have fun,
greg
p.s. If you have the patience, I'd be curious if it works for
you too.
p.p.s Ignore all the silliness in the grub manual about using
a floppy to install on a hard drive. Just start grub up from
the command line (if you use grub --no-floppy), probing takes
much less time. And install it on the right device with
setup(hdx).
p.p.p.s If you give this a try and need more help, feel free
to holler.
--
this signature intentionally left blank
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
