Tom Taylor wrote: > At 12:48 AM 3/28/99 -0800, you wrote: > >Hi, > > > >I've installed RH 5.2 now 4 times and haven't been able to figure out my > >booting from hard-disk problem. > > > >I've got NT4 on the 1st partition of a SCSI hdd and am installing linux > >on sda5 with the swap on sda6 on that same drive. > > > >.... Hi Tom, Thanks for the reply! > What size is your SCSI drive (sda) and are you SURE that it has <1024 > cylinders? You got me wondering so I double-checked. It's an IBM ultra-wide and it's 4.5GB. > Where did you get the cylinder count from? I got the figure from Partition Magic. It reports 555 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sect. sda5 starts at 383 and ends at 550. sda6 -- the swap part. goes from 551-555. > If this came from > the BIOS setup, that is not valid in linux. You mean the SCSI bios? I tried turning off ext. bios trans. for dos drives > 1MB in the scsi bios and got "missing operating system" on re-boot. So I turned it back on and was able to boot to NT as normal. > Larger drives are generally > run in LBA mode through the BIOS (another holdover from good old M$). I'm familiar with those bio settings (somewhat) for IDE drives, but there are no bios settings in my cmos for the scsi drives. You must mean the scsi bios. But there are no settings there for that other than the ext. bios trans. -- if that's what you mean. > Most other OS's use the BIOS to access the hard drive but not *nix which does > direct drive access, therefor, the physical geometry may well be >1024 but > the BIOS reports <1024. Do you still think that may be the case with my data above? How/where would I check this? > One of my systems has a 6GB SCSI drive with WinNT4 and RH5.2. I set up > the system with a small partition for WinNT (C: or sda1) of 200MB and RH5.2 > of the second partition of 200MB (sda5) using the first sector of sda5 for > the LILO location. The remainder of the drive is divided between fat, ntfs > and ext2fs partitions. This system has been on and off several times > without any boot problems. Since the WinNT system was on the drive first, I > used the nt loader to dual boot. That's very similar to mine. My 1st partition is NTFS, 2nd is FAT, 3rd is the ext partition where the 2 logical drives for linux reside. I can, btw, boot to win95 -- the 2nd partition -- through the os loader / boot.ini -- with the copy of the boot sector for win95 in NT's root dir. I've tried several variations of the linux bootsector file there --- dd'd and all according to instructions -- and the best I can get is the L or LI in lilo then it chokes. Maybe there's something wrong with the lilo.conf? I have re-run lilo. I'm out of places to look! But I'm suspicious that I happened to notice that the boot sector file looked awfully empty inside when I happened to view it. I also have used fdisk a option to make the partition bootable prior to re-running lilo. I'd be willing to try moving the NT partition to the 2nd partition and not using NT's OS loader if it would work. I've used OS2's boot manager successfully before but it needs a 1 or 2 mb primary partition. And it the extended part for linux counts for a primary then I'm out of partitions. I'd also be willing to dump my 2nd fat partition if needed as I haven't installed anything there and am pretty disenchanted with win9x anyway. Jamie -- ____________________________________________ The Faunt School of Creative Music Accelerated Music Mastery _________________________ http://www.pacificnet.net/~faunt/ phone:818-506-MUSE fax: 818-508-0429
