Very Computer

Many people have trouble with lilo. Personally, I gave up and
boot from floppy. The added delay is irrelevant since my machine
is always on.

Previously I found that installing a boot partition only seems
to work if lilo runs on that same disk.
Then there are limitations to the position of the kernel on the
disk. Has to be somewhere in the first 512 sectors, I believe.
Check the man pages, howto's and the newsgroups.

So in short: create a boot floppy during installation and install
lilo afterwards.

Quote:

> I have to boot to patch the kernel.  But I have to patch the
> kernel to boot.  See the problem?  What's the trick for
> getting this thing to boot so I can patch the kernel?

Patching the kernel is not required to boot. Did I miss something?

Good luck.
Guus.

The rescue floppy is a different thing.
I believe that one of the installation options is to create
a boot floppy.

Alternatively, you can use 'mkrboot loadlin' and create a zip
file that can load a linux kernel from windoze.

mkboot says it creates a boot floppy if lilo is not installed.

Or you can get copy of a boot floppy and edit syslinux.cfg to
change the root filesystem.

Quote:> I have a 32MB boot partition at the very beginning of the
> disk. The extended partition contains my 192MB swap file and
> gigs of root partition.

> Yeah, I realize now that patching the kernel is not required
> to boot.  The problem is LILO and not the kernel.

> Let me tell how I have my harddrives setup:

> PIIX ide0: master(DVD-ROM)
> PIIX ide1: master(CD-RW)
> HPT  ide2: master(28GB--Windows 98SE C:, boot drive)
> HPT  ide3: master(6GB--Linux: boot, swap, root partitions)

> I guess what is happening is that LILO is on the master boot
> record of the 28GB drive.  It then has to go to the 6GB
> drive to get the boot block.  Is that right?

That sounds correct.

Quote:> Could LILO be using different geometry?  CHS instead of LBA?

No, I guess that is bios stuff. But I am no expert.

Try this: Boot your computer with a floppy, then at the prompt type
lilo.

jamess
--
"On the side of the software box, in the 'System Requirements' section,
it said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed Linux."

-Anonymous

Try the "linear" option in your lilo.conf.

-- Chuan-kai Lin

The boot disk I am talking about is an ms-dos formatted,
bootable floppy with a few files. Here is a listing of mine:

LDLINUX  SYS      5488 12-17-1998   9:36
SYSLINUX CFG        80 01-03-2000   1:04
LINUX           486431 05-22-2000  16:33
message  txt       157 05-22-2000  21:28  message.txt

The configuration file SYSLINUX.CFG contains
parameters, such as the following:

DISPLAY message.txt
TIMEOUT 100
PROMPT 1
DEFAULT linux
APPEND root=/dev/hda1 ro

Guus.

<snip>

Don't know if you've tried this, but it helped me.

I'm using an HPT366 on a BP6 using Suse 6.4. I had this problem
installing LILO on a drive on this controller.  It turned out
the geometry was changing when booted up.  I downloaded the latest
version of LILO and read the README.2nd which was very interesting.
Basically, booted into a clean DOS, ran the 'disk.com' program
provided with LILO and noted the numbers given back and put them
into my 'lilo.conf', so in my case:
<lilo.conf>
disk = /dev/hde
        bios = 0x80
        sectors = 63
        heads = 16
        cylinders = 16383
</lilo.conf>

Putting in the CHS values found when the machine was booted in Linux
didn't work.  This works a treat and I can boot directly from this
drive and get UDMA66 support.

HTH, rich.