I have installed slackware8.1 and everything worked out nice. But I can’t boot from the hard drive since my bios doesn’t recognize hard drives bigger then 2.1GB and my hard drive is 20GB.

I always have to boot from a floppy and that’s a bit annoying.

I have tried to solve this with adding "linear" to lilo.conf
But when typing /sbin/lilo I get an error saying that the 1024 cylinder thingy may mess things up.

And when I reboot I get the "L 40"-error again.
I have tried some other methods that I’ve found on different homepages and forums but nothing seems to work.
Does anyone have a solution?

you need to find bios update for your motheboard, your only hope

Well in that case i dont have any hope. There is no bios-uppgrade for my old crapy bios. There must be another way to solve this.

Yeah, there is. Does your BIOS recognise that there is a harddisk there at all? Even if it doesn't report the correct size? If so, then all you need to do is make sure that your kernel and boot partition are well within this limit. As an example: I have, in the past, installed Linux onto a P-75 who's BIOS would only recognise the first 512MB of the harddisk... which was 15Gb. No problem! I put made sure that the /boot was on a seperate partition which was the 1st partition. Installed LiLo and all went well. Linux booted and recognised that the harddrive was not 512Mb but 15Gb.

Yes Bios recognizes that there is a disk.

Can I do this with cfdisk without having to reinstall slackware?
Maybe it’s possible to change hda3 to hda1 and hda1 to hda3. Or will that mess things up? Reinstalling takes so looooooong time on my old computer.

This is how my disk is partitioned.


hda2 Primay Linux ext3 1998,75MB
hda3 Bootable Primary Linux ext3 1003,49MB
hda5 Logical Linux ext3 171190,84MB
hda1 Primary Linux Swap 296,12

Is it possible!? Im going crazy!!!

I'm having the exact same problem with conectiva 8,
I'm tring to use a 40 GB HD in a pentium 1

I keep receiving 40 L error ... what that mean?