On Fri, 03 Mar 2000, Stefan Bellon wrote:
> > From memory, the 8.4 Gig limit was/is made up by 1023 cylinders, 63
> > heads, & 63 sectors or something like that.
>
> Right. At least that's what the HOWTOs say as well.
Oh, do they? what a surprise ;-)
This is crystalysing for me into one simple problem: your BIOS does not
recognise the /boot partition with linux installed as a system disk.
The other real possibility here is that lilo is setting up a different
spot from the one the bios reads as the boot record. Then the system
would look for a boot record, miss it, and howl for the system disk. What's the
lzone setting in the bios? It should be '0' or 'number of tracks - 1' (524).
But with 128 heads showing, each 'track' in the bios is 8 tracks on the normal
format (i.e.16 heads), and as your disk really only has 2 heads, the lies to
the hard disk controller get thicker and thicker. I'd set lzone to '0' and run
lilo again
.. If you make the same partition (tracks 1-3), format is for DOS, and boot
off a Dos floppy system disk and execute "sys A: C:"
will it boot from the hard drive? I bet it will.
Then if you change partition type, reformat, run lilo, and boot linux from it,
it will not. Correct?
ergo, the linux boot system of the distribution you use is not recognised by
the BIOS, or it's in the wrong part of the disk.
I would try installing a floppy based distribution - one of those miniature
ones. It could be the version of Lilo.
Don't laugh, but you might try this. Write a floppy, with your kernel
named io.sys, your System.map called msdos.sys (Dos attributes here are
read-only, hidden, system) and some other file called command.com. The Dos
"sys" command might just place them for you correctly. This would leave /boot
as a Dos format disk, but you should be able to run the system this way. This is
heresy, I know, but at least it's funny even if it doesn't work ;-)
(as you can judge, all technical stuff is done by the seat of the
pants here ;-)
One other idea worth a whirl is to use dd to read the boot record and write
loads of copies of it. As dd just copies the data, you can 'format' your disk
with boot partitions, (i.e. copy the boot sector to every sector in the
/dev/hda1 partition) and then try again. This time it should read the boot
sector, and then freeze, If this occurs, you have a location problem.
Let us know how you get on. You've got me going on this one.
--
Regards,
Declan Moriarty.
