I realize this message is slightly off topic, but I am struggling with
getting lilo installed and have exhausted all other resources. I have been
using linux for a long while and am very familiar with installation.
Basically I recently purchased two Maxtor IDE 40 Gbyte hard drives, and an
IWill DBD100 dual Pentium III motherboard. I got the two hard drives up and
running in an HP Pavilion 8495 with no problems. Lilo installed and the
kernel boots from the hard drive.
When I installed the new motherboard however, lilo freezes after printing
"LI". So I dug into what was available on large disks, lilo, etc. I got a
real education in the history of disks drives in the PC. I then begin to
try a variety of things to get this up and running.
Basically what I have now is, the drives are set the LBA mode. The bios has
an IDE autodetect feature that will probe the drive and set the values for
the drive based on whether I want the drive in the LBA, LARGE, or NORMAL
modes. The drive returns a size of 4982/255/63 (the 4982 is close but may
not be exact as the drives are at home and I am at work). If I run
dparam.com that comes with lilo under dos I get 1024/240/63. If I run
hdparm -g /dev/hdb (I am installing linux on the second drive), I get
5098/240/63 (using 2.3.47 kernel).
I have tried installing lilo with any and all of these geometries force via
the lilo.conf file and none of these will boot successfully. I have also
tried each of these with and without linear mode.
The problem seems to be simple, linux and the bios have to have the same
idea of where the second boot loader are located, but for the life of me I
cannot get these two on the same page.
Also, this motherboard has a built-in SCSI controller, but I don't want to
(obviously) throw away 80 Gbytes of storage. Should I get a SCSI driver for
booting and use the IDE drives for /usr, /home, etc.
I have read of other people having more success by getting a 66 Mhz IDE
controller (the promise controller). This sounds like a good idea anyway
since it would talk to the drive faster than the 33 Mhz on board IDE. The
drives themselves are 66Mhz capable.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Jack (Butch) Griffin
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 29 2000 - 21:00:10 EST