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

Werner Almesberger (almesber@lrc.di.epfl.ch)
Sat, 9 Aug 1997 00:44:03 +0200 (MET DST)


Dave Cinege wrote:
> Aug 8 17:07:23 Zen-Machine kernel: hdb: The drive reports both 126222336 and
> 126789120 bytes as its capacity

Hmm, that may potentially mean geometry problems. Trying it with or without
LINEAR should help.

> I am working between a few system here.

Ah, okay, now I understand what you mean. On your workstation, just put

disk = /dev/hda bios = 0

(or disk = /dev/hdb bios = 0 if the CD-ROM is the master)

> B - My router. This is an old 486 that doesn't even have onboard I/O. I am
> using a promise floppy max IDE adapter with it (made for the LS-120). It has
> an onboard BIOS with boot support, but it resides at the quarterary IDE
> memory location. Even though the LS-120 is the only thing in this system,
> linux sees it as hdg.

... and the BIOS (e.g. DOS) sees it as drive 0 a.k.a. A:, even if it
contains 120 MB media, right ?

> C - One of my dev systems. This has BIOS boot support and the LS-120 is the
> only thing in it right now, so it shows up as hda. I just moved my testing
> over to this because I am sick of bringing my entire network down. : P

Okay, and here things look the same as in the router, BIOS-wise, correct ?

> Now I'm not much of a lilo guru (I've been spolied by Debian) but I assume
> if I list the boot device as /dev/hdb, and put it in one of the machines
> that sees it as /dev/hda or /dev/hdg it will not complete the boot
> cycle....but I still expect to see somthing first. (Like the LILO message)

If your initrd is self-contained, it should complete the boot process.
If it tries to mount something else as the root FS, that may fail.

> All I am getting now is " 01" racing up the screen.

You're probably trying to access the LS-120 as drive 0x80 or 0x81 a.k.a.
C: or D:.

> This is what I was using (cut and modified from the debian mkrboot script):

Looks good.

> lilo.conf

should be

# compact - not yet. Get it to work first, then optimize.
append="load_ramdisk=1"
disk = /dev/hda bios = 0 # or hdb, see remark earlier in this mail
image=/floppy/linux
label=linux # you actually don't need this
initrd=/floppy/root.bin

> Most likely they will be the device to replace the standard floppy drive.

So let's hope we'll get them to work ;-)))

> Hmm your call. hf0 hf1 maybe?? I don't like the current scheme where it
> moves all over the place.

Mark ?

- Werner

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