Very Computer

I have a system with one IDE and one SCSI disk. The BIOS allows me to
start from either one (plus many more). The one it starts from is BIOS
disk number 0x80, the other one 0x81. If I install Lunix on the SCSI,
the resultant partition will not boot, because the disk number written
in the first sector of the partition is wrong. The symptom is that when
booting from that partition I get just an L on the screen. When patching
the boot sector to use disk 0x80 instead of 0x81, I get LI prompt, but
then get other errors presumable because the second part of the loaded
also is wrongly written: you can hear the IDE disk making weird noises
even though the boot is from SCSI. The only way to get it to install
properly is to disconnect the IDE drive during the install process. It
should be noted that during the install process the disk numbers are the
same as during the actual boot process. The lilo config is OK.
So I have some questions:
- Is this a known problem? Is there a way around it?
- Looking in the LILO source, it looks like it is hard coded to use only
disks 0x80 and 0x81. In theory you can have 127, and certainly my BIOS
allows 4 at least. Why this restriction?
- Why doesn't the loader pick up the disk number from the BIOS so you
don't have that problem in the first place? I though when the first
sector is loaded the disk number is on one of the registers?

Note: Redhat 5.1 had the same problem. Even when booting from a custom
boot disk and running LILO didn't fix it.

Thanks and regards, Mat Nieuwenhoven

I have same problem when I add a new IDE harddisk to existing 2 SCSI disks.
But thanks to your post I get some hints to the actual problem.. Finally I
get the problem solved by adding following lines to the global section of
lilo.conf & re-run lilo

disk = /dev/sda
bios = 0x80

Samuel Tan