Re: LILO
Anthony Barbachan (barbacha@Hinako.AMBusiness.com)
Wed, 6 Jan 1999 03:28:47 -0500
This has most often happened to me when installing LILO on the MBR, which is
one of the reasons I stopped installing LILO there. What I do is to install
LILO on the root partition. (something like /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda)
Sometimes you'll get the same problem even when doing this (because the MBR
is currupt), especially if you had lilo on the MBR before; but with lilo now
installed on the booting partition you can safely use any DOS bootable disk
and run the FDISK /MBR command which restores your drive's MBR to its normal
state. If you already have lilo on the booting partition get a DOS bootable
disk and run the FDISK /MBR command, if that doesn't work boot up with a
floppy and run the lilo command. If none of these solutions work than I
suspect you partitioned your drive as large, huge, or normal. It should be
on LBA. Your BIOS would probably tell you this on its bootup screen. And
even if its LBA there, Linux would have automatically detected the format on
the drive upon bootup which means Linux may not be using the right
head/cyl/sec combo. You can check this by going into fdisk and enter 'p'
for print. If the number of cylanders is greater than 1023 than your drive
was not partitioned in LBA mode. In this case, your BIOS may be trying to
boot it as LBA which lilo is installing itself as some other format as Linux
may be using a different geometry. In this case your best option may be to
reinstall, this time partitioning and configuring your BIOS in LBA mode.
You could probably work around this by disabling the EIDE autodetected
feature in your BIOS (but leave auto in the format field
(huge/large/normal/LBA), set you drive to none, and boot from a kernel
dumped onto a floppy. After the bootup run the lilo command. (BTW, remove
the HEADS= SECTORS= CYLINDERS= fields from lilo.conf it will screw you up if
it ain't doing so already)
-----Original Message-----
From: Glenn MacGregor <gtm@oracom.com>
To: linux-admin <linux-admin@vger.rutgers.edu>
Cc: linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu>
Date: Tuesday, January 05, 1999 12:21 PM
Subject: LILO
>Hi all,
> I am not a current emeber of this list so could you cc answers to me
>(gtm@oracom.com). Thank you.
>
>I am trying to load linux 2.0.35 on to a DEC Personal Workstation 300i.
>The load goes fine (I am using S.U.S.E 5.3) but when I finish and try to
>boot from the drive LILO hangs at LI. I have read a lot about why that
>happens and nothing seems to work. I have added the disk geometry into
>lilo.conf and reran lilo. I did this in the global section with DISK=
>and HEADS= SECTORS= CYLINDERS=. When I do this I get L 04 04
>(continuing for ever) and when I have no geometry it hangs at LI. This
>is a 4 gig Western Digital EIDE drive. Any advice would be great.
>
> Thank you all
>
> Glenn
>--
>
>Glenn MacGregor
>
>Applications Engineer
>Oracom, Inc.
>http://www.oracom.com
>
>Tel. +1 978.557.5710 Ext. 302
>Fax +1 978.557.5716
>
>-
>To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
>the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
>Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
>
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/