Re: LILO and kernel bootsector will not boot off an LS-120 IDE floppy.

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
8 Aug 1997 22:11:06 GMT

Followup to: <m0wwv4x-0005bxC@Schizo.psychosis.com>
By author: "Dave Cinege" <dcinege@psychosis.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> This does work with a 1.44mb disk in the drive. It will not work with an
> LS-120 because it is not 12-bit FAT.
>
> I've still had no more luck with lilo. I have noticed that the LS-120 is
> getting addressed as hdg instead of hda because of the memory address the
> IDE controller resides at. It is one of the little idiot cards made just for
> LS-120 boot compatibility. I'm making the disk on my system as hda. Could
> this be screwing things up?
>

Well, you could use mkdosfs to write a 12-bit FAT filesystem on the
LS-120 disk (mkdosfs lets you force the size of the FAT.) However,
note that the reason SYSLINUX only supports FAT12 is that up to this
point I hadn't heard of any reason to support FAT16. FAT16 would be
very simple to support for bzImages; for zImages it would be somewhat
trickier due to contention for low memory, but fortunately that is
something that could be worked around that problem (since a zImage is
of limited size, one can chase the FAT in advance and store in a
table.)

If you want me to add FAT16 support, let me know and I'll try to have
it in 1.40.

-hpa

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