Hello,

I just bought a new harddisk for my server. Now I have about 9 harddisk in my server.

This my setup at the moment:

- Two IDE Harddisks connected to the motherboard
- Two SATA Harddisks connected to the Fasttrack SATA controllers (onboard) on the motherboard
- Four IDE Harddisks on a Promise Ultra133 IDE Controller

And just now I have bought a Promise SATA300 TX4 Controller and connected a Western Digital 500GB drive to it.

The problem I've been getting after connecting the new WD 500GB HD, partitioning it as an EXT3 and rebooting is the following: after it is connected in addition to the other harddisks that are already in there I encounter some trouble booting LILO.

It just says "LIL" and keeps hanging there.

According to some documentation this is the problem:
The second stage boot loader has been started, but it can't load the descriptor table from the map file. This is typically caused by a media failure or by a geometry mismatch.

I have rebooted my server using an Ubuntu Live CD or Knoppix in order to repartition/reformat the harddisk. I have also tried several filesystems (EXT2, ReiserFS) but still get the same problem. At the moment I am really clueless on what the problem might be. Help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

have you reran lilo after making these changes? Whenever I modify hard drive setup, I always rerun lilo. I've forgotten to do it a couple times and had to boot a livecd and do the same. Not sure what distro you're running, but this is the case for me at least with gentoo.

I haven't rerun lilo, never had to do so after installing a new drive. I am using Debian by the way. Could it be anything else perhaps, BIOS settings perhaps?

Maybe it's changing the disk order. Do a "fdsik -l" with and without the new disk, and make sure the disks you know about are still named the same.
Other than that, can't help.

The system interacts between the BIOS and the motherboard. The original BIOS was intended to include a total of 8 hard drives. YOUR configuration, as awesome and desirable as it is, is 9 hard drives. Beyond the capabilities of the BIOS. YOU need to upgrade the BIOS, and/or upgrade the motherboard.