Can't Get LILO to work!!!!! Hangs at LI

[Yann St-Arnaud]

We can't get LILO to work with our system. It hangs at LI. We've
looked everywhere as for how to fix this but we didn't find anything
that worked. Although we believe it has to do with our HD size...we
have a Fujitsu 4.37gb UDMA. So we decided to use a zDisk. But the
thing is...our system has 128Mb of RAM and Linux only sees 64...And to
fix this we were told we need the append="mem 128M" in lilo.conf. So
here we are....WE NEED to fix LILO! So if anyone out there can help us
please DO SO!!!!

[Ed Toivanen]

In article <34b67414...@news.videotron.ca>, Tech-...@Optidynamic.com
says...

>
>We can't get LILO to work with our system. It hangs at LI. We've
>looked everywhere as for how to fix this but we didn't find anything
>that worked.

I had the identical problem this morning and spent the day trying to fix it.
I had LILO on the mbr since I installed, and subsequently uninstalled, linux on
/dev/hda2. I installed NT on top of linux, and has been fine, although wierd,
up until this morning.

Solution: reinstall linux *on top* of NT. It worked. I can boot again, and I
still have all my /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2. If only I can get metro-x to work
with my ATI card...

Ed

[TEX]

Yes.

Clayton Russell wrote:

> I have had the same problem. I have installed RH5 about 4 times now and every time
> it hangs at LI. I have cleaned the MBR with win95 "fdisk /mbr" before each
> install but am still stuck. I am installing onto a second hard drive in the
> secondary ide port hdb1. Is the problem trying to boot from there???

--
LINUX LIVES

TEX http://www.ccms.net/~mhtexcollins/78704.htm

Onward through the fog!

[Clayton Russell]

[Tim Schwenk]

Clayton Russell wrote:

I recently had the same problem, and here is the answer - If you are using a hard
drive with more than 1023 cylinders (and I know you are!) AND your bios does not
support LBA, your kernel MUST reside in a partition that is completely within the
first 1023 cylinders. It's unfortunate since linux does not use the bios for disk
access, it can happily handle pretty much any size drive, but LILO runs before the
kernel is loaded (obviously) and therefore depends on the BIOS for disk access and
thus will not find your kernel if the partition in which it resides extends past the
1023rd cylinder. The solution is to repartion your drive so that at least the first
partion is below the 1023rd cylinder and put your kernel, among other things, there.
Obviously you can then make addtional partitions for /usr and/or /home and, although I
didn't need to try it, I would bet that they can be any size at all so you can still
use the full capacity of the drive. It doesn't matter whether the drive is the first
or second, so don't worry about that. Don't feel bad, I struggled through the same
thing for almost a full day until I figured it out. After 4 installs, you certainly
get an A+ for persistence.

Good luck!

[Leigh Middleton]

Clayton Russell wrote:
>
> Ed Toivanen wrote:
>
> > In article <34b67414...@news.videotron.ca>, Tech-...@Optidynamic.com
> > says...
> > >
> > >We can't get LILO to work with our system. It hangs at LI. We've
> > >looked everywhere as for how to fix this but we didn't find anything
> > >that worked.
> >
> > I had the identical problem this morning and spent the day trying to fix it.
> > I had LILO on the mbr since I installed, and subsequently uninstalled, linux on
> > /dev/hda2. I installed NT on top of linux, and has been fine, although wierd,
> > up until this morning.
> >
> > Solution: reinstall linux *on top* of NT. It worked. I can boot again, and I
> > still have all my /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2. If only I can get metro-x to work
> > with my ATI card...
> >
> > Ed
>
> I have had the same problem. I have installed RH5 about 4 times now and every time
> it hangs at LI. I have cleaned the MBR with win95 "fdisk /mbr" before each
> install but am still stuck. I am installing onto a second hard drive in the
> secondary ide port hdb1. Is the problem trying to boot from there???

I had the same problem and on reading the install HOWTO saw a section
that mentioned that you can only have the boot loaders on the first two
drives that must be attached to the primary IDE controller. If you have
boot loaders on a disk attached to the secondary controller you just get
LI.... when you boot.

[Alec Champlin]

If you haven't already, you should read "LILO - Generic Boot Loader for
Linux ('LInux LOader') by Werner Almesberger." I believe this document can
be found at http://lminux.univ-bpclermont.fr/docs/localdoc/lilo/ as well as
other places.

"The most common BIOS restrictions that affect LILO are the limitation to
two hard disks and the inability to access more than 1024 cylinders per
disk. LILO can detect both conditions, but in order to solve the underlying
problems, manual intervention is necessary."

You are likely experience one of these two common problems. It is my
understanding that the above reference to two hard disks, should really mean
more than two devices connected to your IDE controller. So you might be ok
if you only had 1 HD on primary, master and 1 HD on secondary, slave -- but
you would not be ok if you had 1 HD on primary, master; 1 CD-ROM on primary,
slave; and 1 HD on secondary, slave. It all depends on the BIOS
configuration and how advanced your BIOS is.

The other problem concerning more than 1024 cylinders per disk, can
typically be solved by specifying Linear Block Addressing (LBA) mode in both
your BIOS and in your LILO configuration. If LBA is not available for some
reason than you can typically partition your HD into smaller partitions as
someone else has noted in their post.

I hope some of this info will help.

Clayton Russell wrote in message <34C6AD80...@student.qut.edu.au>...

[Simon Kinahan]

Tim Schwenk wrote:
> I recently had the same problem, and here is the answer - If you are using a hard
> drive with more than 1023 cylinders (and I know you are!) AND your bios does not
> support LBA, your kernel MUST reside in a partition that is completely within the
> first 1023 cylinders.

Before you sigh, and try to do this, you might want to check that your lilo.conf
contains the word 'linear' near the top. This tells LILO to send the BIOS LBA
addresses, rather than screwed-up CHS addresses for disk block. AFAIK this is
necessary even for modern BIOSes which support LBA. If you don't do it the 1023
cylinder limit will still get you.

YMMV

Simon