At 06:41 PM 1/11/00 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I have a problem with a new install of RedHat on a very old machine with a
13G
>hard drive. I've searched through various and sundry Linux and RedHat
lists and
>newsgroups and I can't seem to fix it.
>
>I have an old Dell 486/66. I put in a new 13G drive. It boots fine
>from a floppy but caLILO hangs at LI. I have tried all advice I could
>find except for upgrading the BIOS and/or motherboard. Changes to
>/etc/lilo.conf like linear or specifying the geometry have produced no
>change, so far. (The machine will only run Linux and almost never be
>rebooted, so I don't really need LILO to work from the Harddrive, but
>it would make me feel better if it dit.)
>
>
>The disk geometry is something like 12,613 cyclinders 32 heads 63
>sectors. I can't even type five digits into the BIOS for the number of
>cylinders (the latest BIOS copyright date is only 5 years ago - what
>were they thinking?). Is there a way to just get all the info into the
>lilo.conf and find the right settings. I tried 1024,16,63 because that
>worked for somebody somewhere. I can repartition and reinstall from
>now until the cows come home, so reformatting the drive is no problem
>either.
>
>I never had a DOS system use the hard drive I just put it in the
>machine and started up the install process. Though I did stick a dos
>boot disk in for the "fdisk /mbr" attempt to fix the problem.
>
>
It sounds like LILO can not load your kernel. This is probably because
LILO has to use the BIOS to read it from the disk, and it is on part
of the disk that the BIOS doesn't know about. If you really want it to
work, try making a small partition at the start of the disk for boot,
and then the rest of your partitions. That way the BIOS will be able
to read the part where the kernel is. How big you want to make the
partition depends on how many versions on the kernel you want to be
able to choose from. But 10M should be more then you will ever need!
Mikkel
(The LILO docs explain this problem in detail...)
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
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