You're welcome.
> My question on the boot is this: with both Choose OS (CHOS) and LILO I get
> complaints about where I have installed Linux, about 8Gb in on a 13.6 Gb
> disk. Something to the effect that my BIOS may not recognize where I have
> installed Linux.
Does your BIOS see the full capacity of your drive? If so, it's very
unlikely that you have to worry. Here's a quick history of what's happened
in BIOS's lately with regard to hard drives:
1. At first, BIOS's couldn't handle hard drives larger than 1024 physical
cylinders. This limited drives to 512MB.
2. Then LBA was introduced. LBA-capable BIOS's could use a logical
geometry for a drive rather than its physical geometry, to make disks
up to 8GB (hard drive manufacturers generally call this anywhere from 8.4GB
to 8.6GB because they use "gigabyte" to mean "one billion bytes" rather
than the computer's definition, which is 2^30 bytes.... FYI) appear to
only have 1024 cylinders.
3. A couple years ago, INT13 extensions to LBA were introduced. This
allowed the BIOS to handle hard drives that were larger than 8GB.
The BIOS saw the drive as having more than 1024 cylinders, but it could
still access it by means of some weird voodoo magic. However, the BIOS
itself couldn't really see past the 1024th cylinder (which falls at 8
binary gigabytes, remember), so it couldn't boot from a partition beyond
that cylinder.
4. Apparantly, shortly thereafter, another BIOS extension was slipped in
quietly that allowed booting beyond the 1024th cylinder. I say "quietly"
because I never heard about it until the new LILO came out. I'm not
sure how exactly this extension works or how many BIOS's have it, but
as I understand it all BIOS's manufactured within the past couple years
do have this new extension.
Make sure you have the line "lba32" in your lilo.conf. LILO will
probably always spit out a warning in case where you're trying to
boot from a partition beyond the 1024th cylinder, because it has
no way of knowing whether your BIOS can handle it or not.
However, there's no risk in trying: if it doesn't work, you still
have your boot disk.
> Are there any ways that I can use a boot manager that will recognize my
> Linux partition that deep in my disk?
>
> My mobo is a VA 503+ v1.2 running a modern VIA BIOS, which I hear supports
> disks to 30Gb, if that makes any difference.
You shouldn't have a problem. LILO is just reporting a warning and not
an error, right? Most its exact output here, as well as your lilo.conf,
and I can be more helpful. Your BIOS sounds like it can handle things.
Incidently, you mentioned that you tried the boot disk trick I mentioned.
Did you have to pass a root= argument to the kernel on the boot disk,
or did it boot straight into Linux? If it did... I wonder how a kernel
on a boot disk knows where the root partition is?
Good luck.
--
Craig McPherson
Network Admin
Baptist Student Union
Fayetteville, Arkansas
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