LILO: Won't load off floppy!!

LILO: Won't load off floppy!!

Post by Dan Siemo » Tue, 17 Sep 1996 04:00:00



        I finally managed to get Red Hat linux to install but now the floppy I
made with LILO on it during the install won't load. The computer goes to
the disk dirve, reads a bit then freezes. All I get on my screen where the
LILO prompt should be is "LI", it just stops there! Any ideas would be
greatly appreciated
        Dan Siemon

 
 
 

LILO: Won't load off floppy!!

Post by Perry Gri » Tue, 17 Sep 1996 04:00:00


|>   I finally managed to get Red Hat linux to install but now the floppy I
|> made with LILO on it during the install won't load. The computer goes to
|> the disk dirve, reads a bit then freezes. All I get on my screen where the
|> LILO prompt should be is "LI", it just stops there! Any ideas would be
|> greatly appreciated
|>   Dan Siemon

How big is you hard drive (over 1024 cylinders?) and did you
tell lilo the drive geometry?  There is probably a lilo man
page and a howto (?).
--

Perry Grieb


 
 
 

1. Lilo won't load os/2, os/2 won't load lilo

I'm having some problems getting OS/2 Warp, Dos/Windoze, and Linux to
cohabitate on the same machine.

When I set up lilo with another os (being os/2) I can boot from the drive
where the os/2 boot manager is, and it does indeed load an operating system
that isn't linux, but its not os/2 either.  It loads dos.  The drive
structure is such:

1'st IDE drive: WD 540 meg, formatted ext2fs, linux, lilo on MBR
2'nd IDE drive: WD 540 meg, 1'st partiton 1 meg with os/2 boot manager, 2'nd
                partition is DOS/Windoze, formatted FAT
3'rd IDE drive: WD 340 meg, formatted hpfs, os/2 warp, no boot manager
Linux:          Slackware 2.0, patched kernel to 1.1.38 (where the drives
                actualy work for the first time with no BIOS adjustments!)
Other Problem
causing toys:   Mitsumi CDROM, Colorado 250MB tape (I stopped posting about
                that one long ago :(, 2 floppies, Soundblaster 16 compatible
                sound card, SMC Elite combo ethernet card (8013EC or ~)

So LILO seems to skip right over the partition with os/2's boot manager and
loads up DOS.  Despite the fact that i specified in my lilo.conf for the
os/2_db (spelling) loader to use /dev/hdb1, and that dos is on hdb2.

I've tried putting the other 540 meg drive first, and using OS/2's boot
manager to load everything.  But the fdisk setup program for os/2's boot
manager refuses to believe that there is an operting system on the linux
drive, and it won't let me set up a boot manager option to load it.   :(

I've also tried a utility I picked up from a sunsite cd; setboot.  This is
supposed to pick a boot manager to use on reboot from among different drives
and partition.  It can't seem to find ANY boot managers though, not even the
one that LInux is using!  (damn thing)

On a side note I can't get LInux to read my third drive.  I used the
MAKEDEV script to build the device drivers for the third drive (hd1a)
but Linux just gives that annoying useless drive busy, wrong fs type, or
some other error when I try to access it from anything like mount or fdisk.
This seems to hold true whether the third drive is the DOS drive or the HPFS
one.  DOS/WINDOZE/OS/2 can all see this drive fine though....
Perhaps this is a problem with Enhanced IDE controllers on PCI buses?

Well, I'll stop here.  :)  
If I can get all that to work, I'll be a very happy camper for a few days
until I start tinkering with other stuff.  I seem to enjoy setting up
odd things much more than I do using them anyhow.   ;>

-Steve Rojem

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