LILO Problem

[Ali Ziad Abu-Zayyad]

Hello All,

I am running Red Hat 3.0.3 (updated kernel to 2.0). I tried configuring
LILO and gave
up on it since my machine was such a mess. I have a 486DX33 with two
drives. The
first setup as C is a 202 MB drive with a primary DOS partition and a
PQBoot Partition
the second a 2GB drive which my BIOS cannot completely see. Here is what I
did,

I installed a WD utility to overcome my bios limitation and I believe it
sits on the MBR on C.
Once the TSR is loaded and the machine can see the complete 2G second
drive. I use a
loader that came with Partition Magic, PQBoot which is installed on it's
own 1M partition on C
Now the PQBoot loader comes up fine and presents its menu to load, DOS,
Windows 95,
or Linux. What I do now is boot DOS, then run LoadLin to boot the unix
kernel. When I try
to boot linux directly from PQBoot, it starts booting from the ext2 linux
partition on which I
installed lilo (on the second HD) . I get,

LILO

0x04
:
0x04 repeatedly while it tries to do something with drive A!

If I had a linux boot disk in A. The message becomes,

0x80 ~_ bad / invalid geometry

Is it a helpless case or is there hope since the presence of the four
letters 'L' 'I' 'L' 'O' means
all parts of lilo were successfully loaded, according to the documentation.

Thanks for any suggestions,

Ali Ziad

[Rick W. Purdom]

It might be a good/better idea, if you have a slot available, to use a
controller or bios-card (like from AMI) to support the large hard-drive.
Even under less 'exotic' conditions, or so I believe, when you unload
that WD utility, I believe it's EZ Drive, you will lose everything on
that drive. It will not move over gracefully to a motherboard that
supports it. I would recommend the AMI Bios card or a controller from
DTC (such as the DTC2278).
Luck

[Ali Abu-Zayyad]

Rick W. Purdom wrote:

> It might be a good/better idea, if you have a slot available, to use a
> controller or bios-card (like from AMI) to support the large hard-drive.
> Even under less 'exotic' conditions, or so I believe, when you unload
> that WD utility, I believe it's EZ Drive, you will lose everything on
> that drive. It will not move over gracefully to a motherboard that
> supports it. I would recommend the AMI Bios card or a controller from
> DTC (such as the DTC2278).

> Luck,

Yes it is EZ-Drive. I can buy a flash bios upgrade for ~ $80 dollars. That would
avoid
the EZ-drive utility. I think I will stick with DOS LoadLin until I buy a new
machine.

Thanks for your reply,

Ali Ziad