Installing Etch on a machine with 4 SATA disks proceeds smoothly until it reaches the LILO boot loader installation. The boot loader installation screen offers the choice to install LILO on /dev/sdd or /dev/sda5, the root partition. It seems odd that the installer offers /dev/sdd in place of /dev/sda as a choice. Regardless, attempting to install on /dev/sdd, /dev/sda5, or /dev/sda by typing it in the "other choice" dialog fails with a warning in syslog: "configuring lilo-installer failed with error code 1." Switching to a shell, I indeed see no sbin/lilo and no etc/lilo.conf under /target. If I physically disconnect all but the first SATA disk--which is the only disk I am actually partitioning during the installation--the installation completes successfully. This behavior persists with XFS as well as JFS, the two file systems I tried installing on. I am wondering if someone could suggest how I could debug this further.

Youssef Eldakar
Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Advice: Use GRUB instead of LILO.
Either you use LILO or GRUB, it should be on /dev/sda, not /dev/sdaX nor /dev/sdd*. It's because the BIOS will look for a bootable sector on the device, not on the partition, and it will look at the first HD, /dev/sda. It's filesystem independent: this is BIOS functionality, not linux neither LILO nor GRUB.

I would like to use XFS, and GRUB is known to freeze with XFS partitions. The installer does warn about this.

Youssef Eldakar
Bibliotheca Alexandrina