Good thought, Lawson, but either it's not the problem or I did it wrong. I'm
used to thinking in terms of a 1024-cylinder limit, but not a 256-cylinder
limit, so until you suggested this, I didn't try a separate /boot partition.
Now I have; no joy.
Background: the LS120 is an IDE device, typically attached as Secondary
Master. Newer motherboards know how to boot from them, putting them in the
boot sequence wherever you have the floppy (A:) drive. So from the BIOS'
point of view, they are a peculiar mix of ATA and floppy devices.
In Linux, fdisk and its relatives see it as a standard, partitionable IDE
device (i.e., like a hard drive, not like a CD). It reports one as 963/8/32
CHS. I can use fdisk to edit the partition table, mke2fs to make
filesystems, then successfully mount them, read to them, write to them.
The problem is (apparently) with LILO's ability to boot from them. I set up
a lilo.conf file with this relevant portion (I'm leaving out all the
comments, including all the executable lines):
# LINEAR
boot=/dev/hdc
root=/dev/hdc2
disk=/dev/hdc
bios=0x00
cylinders=963
heads=8
sectors=32
install=/mnt/boot/boot.b
map=/mnt/boot/map
delay=20
vga=normal
default=Debian
image=/mnt/boot/vmlinux-2.2.15
label=Debian
read-only
When I run this (as "lilo -C /etc/lilo-ls120.conf"), the LS120 disk is
mounted as follows
/dev/hdc2 on /mnt (about 100 megs)
/dev/hdc1 on /mnt/boot (about 10 megs)
With this setup installed on the drive, it starts to boot but stops at LIL,
which I read as "probably" indicating a geometry mismatch. If I uncomment
LINEAR, it stops at LI instead.
I've found a bunch of instructions, in archives of various mailing lists,
that purport to tell me how to make this work. Some are plain wrong (one
reversed the numbers for heads and sectors in a sample file the author
claimed worked!); others start by saying it "works" and end by saying "it
works except for ..." some important detail; others are doing a
syslinux-style boot to RAM disk (I didn't even know LILO *could* do this); a
couple actually use syslinux and a DOS filesystem; and one talked about
mounting the filesystem as root after booting from a hard disk.
I've yet to find an unqualified "it works" report anywhere. The
manufacturer's Web site doesn't have any documents with the word "Linux" in
them.
So ... my original question was: "Has anyone done this successfully?" "This"
is boot from the LS120, using LILO, and mounting an ext2 partition as root.
I'm starting to question if it is possible.
At 10:46 PM 6/3/00 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>
>On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Ray Olszewski wrote:
>
>> I thought I'd read that one can boot Linux directly from an LS-120
>> "Superdisk" (IDE type) using LILO. But I'm consistently failing,
>getting
>
>I guess this would be an IDE ATAPI floppy? What does the BIOS think it
>is? Or does it actually connect to a floppy controller? If so, I bet
>the BIOS doesn't interpret but 8 bits of the cylinder number and you
>need to make a /boot partition within the first 256 cylinders. It might
>also choke if you give it a sector number bigger than it thinks a floppy
>can have according to its parameters - pointer in 0:78 IIRC, I can look
>it up if need be. You can read them in /dev/mem.
>
>> geometry errors ... hangs at LI if I boot from a (bootable) partition,
>at
>> LIL if I boot from the MBR. I can format, mount, read to, write from
>the
>> thing just fine.
>
>"boot from a bootable partition" meaning with lilo installed in the
>bartition boot record, and a standard msdose MBR? :-) As opposed to lilo
>installed in the MBR? The way I read LI, it means it has successfully
>read somthing where it thinks /boot/boot.b is, but it is not boot.b.
>LIL means it is boot.b, but it failed to read /boot/map. I think.
>>
>> So ... has anyone out there done this successfully? If so, could you
>tell
>> me
>> what the lilo.conf file needs to look like?
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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