LILO / Booting problem
I've got an old AMD 486 100mhz system with an ASUS VL/I-486SV2GX4 Motherboard. 32 megs RAM
Unfortunately the bios is not a flash chip so its stuck at the original version: AWARD BIOS 4.50G 03/28/95-SIS-85C471-I486SV2G-00 Now I had an old maxtor 500 meg drive in there running slack 8 fine well I put in a 10 gig seagate drive from an xbox now the bios won't recognize anything bigger than a 2 gig drive, thats fine. When installing slack 9 however fdisk sees the drive as the full 10 gigs. So i made a 9 gig hda1 and 1 gig hda2 linux swap installed everything - works a-ok. Now the problem is LILO. Install it in the root of hda1 and the system tries to boot from t floppy - doesnt find anything and hangs. Doesn't say anything. No LILO.. no LI.. no "insert system disk" - nothing. Now if I install it in the MBR then when it tries to boot up I get L 40 40 40 40 40 and the 40's just keep repeating as long as you let them. Now I'm thinking there's a problem reading the root of the 1st partition sinceits 9 gigs and the bios only sees the drive as 2 gigs.. but im not sure why th eMBR lilo doesn't work. So would I have to repartition the drive for a drive which is less than 2 gigs which is bootable, and then have linux on a 6 gig partition with 1 gig swap? im thinking i can't boot a partition over 2 gigs due to the bios (which i can't reflash) and yes hda1 is marked bootable. i can boot the OS fine with a floppy but thats slow and i'd rather just get the system working without needing the floppy anyone have any ideas/suggestions? TIA :) |
Well it might be a bios issue, so it will not boot to the bigger drive.
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So would making a small partition that boots linux (one small enough that the bios sees it) not work?
or could i somehow use the old 500 meg drive which does boot fine and have it boot up the linux on the other harddrive? i mean then it would be /hda and i'd want it to boot /hdb1 and use /hdb2 as swap or would this be too much of a PITA? |
You should creat a /boot partition at the begining of the disk, then do the rest as you wish.
Ginux |
would i be able to do this without having to destroy the first partition (9 gigs) and separate it?
is there a linux utility that will let me take 100 megs off for the boot partition from the 9 gig partition without deleting anything from it? how big should the /boot partition be anyways? 100 megs should be more than enough right? So right now I have /hda1 - 9 gigs - ext2 (beginning of drive) /hda2 - 1 gig - swap and i want: /hda1 - 100 megs - ext2 bootable (beginning of drive) /hda2 - 8.9 gigs - ext2 /hda3 - 1 gig - swap right? is there any way i could make the boot partition /hda3 and still have it at the beginning of the drive? (i'm assuming a small partition at the beginning will be able to be booted by the bios - at least I hope!) also once I have this new partition how would I make it boot the main partition? any links to tutorials or anything would be greatly appreciated - i've installed linux a few times but i'm far form an expert.. never had to make a separate boot partition (and I don't want to have to reinstall linux all over again on a fresh partition lol) :) |
I've found this thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...002/08/1/26934
For the /boot partition size... 50MB would suffice, I remmember on RH6.x it was ~30MB (Or was it 37?....) I don't remmember. Ginux P.s. 1GB SWAP is way to much, unless you would like to use your system for a specific task, but keep in mind that it's slow. |
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