Very Computer

Hi,

I have been trying to get my installation of Red Hat 5.1 to boot
from my Iomega 1 Gb Jaz-disk, but so far no luck. If anyone has
experience in doing this please enlighten me.

I'm running on a Dell Dimension (300 Mhz) with at Pentium II and
the SCSI adapter is an Adaptec AH-2920C (BIOS v 1.32). Booting
from a floppy (which then goes on to load Linux from /dev/sda1
= Jaz disk) goes without problems.

It's when I try to make Linux boot straight from the Jaz disk
that I get an error ("Disk is not bootable") at system start.
I have set the Jaz to have SCSI ID=0 and put the Jaz disk at
the top of the list for bootable devices in the computers BIOS
(normally the 8 Gb IBM DHEA 38451 harddisk is on top).

When I do a "lilo -t -v" after a floppy boot, I get a warning
line saying: "/dev/sda1 not on first disk". My lilo.conf on
the Jaz disk looks like this:

boot=/dev/sda1
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
linear
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.0.34-0.6
   label=linux
   root=/dev/sda1
   initrd=/boot/initrd/initrd-2.0.34-0.6.img
   read-only
other=.....

I have read up on "Jaz-drive mini-HOWTO" but didn't find the answer
to my problems there.

Thanks in advance,
/Arnold

Arnold  --

I have never tried to get RedHat to boot from a Jaz Drive, but that's
just because I am a Slackware nut, not a RedHat nut.  Booting issues
should be about the same one way or the other.

I am dredging this stuff up from memory, since I did this over a year
back.

First of all, I disregarded the shrill warnings from Iomega, and ran
Dos fdisk /mbr on the Jaz Media.  Then I booted up the Slackware Boot
disk, and Root disk, and did a standard linux fdisk on it.  It installed
fine after that.

I do remember, however, that I had to specify in the Adaptec SCSI BIOS
that the media was NOT removable.  (I hope I have that right).  After I
did that, it would boot straight into Linux.  It would not do this until
I changed the SCSI BIOS setting.

I hope this helps.

William F. Simmons (Willie)
Simtech

www.simtech-soft.com
16 Sept 1998

I have had no end of trouble with my dimension 300 and booting.  I have
the stock ide drive with 95 and NT and a scsi drive off an aha2940, but
can only boot linux via floppy if my ide drive is installed..  Lilo will
not write to the ide drive properly, and will complain about not being
the first disk, then when I boot, I get a screen full of horizontal
lines.  Fortunately I just traded it for an optiplex, maybe it will work
better.
Chuck