Booting: Device 0x0309 exceeds 1024 cylinder
 

Hi.
I installed RHL 8.0 on my friend's PC, and it's not booting without a bootdisk. So to fix it, I booted with the bootdisk, logged in as root, and tried the lilo command at the terminal. It gave the following error:
Warning - Device 0x0309 exceeds 1024 cylinder limit
Fatal : Sector 77516620 - Too large for Linear mode (Try lba32 instead)

He has a P4 1.7 GHz PC with an Intel 845 motherboard and a 40GB HDD, and linux is installed on an extended partition, at around 32 GB. The extended partition has a 100 MB /boot partition, a 256 MB swap partition and the main partition in the rest of the space. Lilo was installed on the /boot partition

The same configuration on my 20GB HDD works fine, with Linux installed on last 3 GB of the HDD, and works perfectly fine!

I read somewhere that the above problem could be caused if the linux partition is beyond 8GB, but in that case, it shouldn't have worked on my PC also!

I want to know how I can fix this problem without having to reinstall Linux! Please help!!!! I'm quite sure that the LBA setting is enabled in his BIOS.

The 1024 cylinder is not a problem here, it's just a warning (and it's not important, LILO in RH 8.0 can boot from above).
The problem is in the /etc/lilo.conf file. Somewhere inside there's an line with 'linear'. Change it to 'LBA32'. If there's no 'linear' line, make sure the disk mode in BIOS is set to LBA.