For those that aren't aware, the A7V uses the Promise UDMA100 controller, aside from the standard onboard UDMA66 controller. I have my CD ROM drives installed on the UDMA66 controller (Primary Master and Secondary master respectively).

On the UDMA100 Promise controller, I have a removable drive bay installed. I boot multiple operating systems, and therefore keep a separate OS on each drive. In this way, I simply insert the drive I wish to use before starting the computer.


I decided that I wanted to install Slackware Linux v8.0. After inserting a new Quantum Fireball 30GB AS HD, and booting the Slackware 8.0 installation CD, I choose the ata100.i kernel (the one that supports UDMA66 and UDMA100 controllers like the Promise!)

After booting to the prompt, I continued by FDISKing my drive, setting up the partitions, and formatting each using mkfs (mke2fs extension for the ext2 filesystems, and mkswap for the swap partition). For the record, the Quantum attached to the Promise is labelled as hde, so each partition was as follows:
250 meg MSDOS ----> hde1
1.5 GB root / ----> hde2
512 MB SWAP ----> hde3
Extended -----> hde4
10GB /usr -------> hde5
3 GB /opt ------> hde6
5GB /home -----> hde7
500MB /var -----> hde8

I continued by typing 'setup' to start the Slackware 8 installation. Everything went smoothly (performed expert install, etc.) until I got to the setting up LILO portion. LILO DOES NOT INSTALL PROPERLY!! After it says "LILO has encountered errors and did not install", I am able to exit back out! I decided to make a boot disk as well, with LILO on it.


Here's the scenario:

If I don't use the boot disk, I receive:
LI
ONLY THE FIRST TWO BLOODY LETTERS! Someone please tell me why it's not allowing LILO to install properly???

If I use the boot disk, I'm able to boot, but then I receive a KERNEL PANIC somewhere into the initialization phase!

PLEASE, someone help me, because I have installed LINUX before on standard systems (using the onboard IDE controllers), but I have never tried to install it on a system that uses a configuration similar to the ASUS A7V!!


Thanks,

Soul

..??

Soul,

I know it's possible, I have 8.0 loaded on my A7V. I really didn't know what I was doing with this Distro so I had to load it quite a few times before I got it working. I still need to get my cdrom squared away. I did the expert install with Lilo and it worked just fine. At first I was also trying to use Partition Magic's Boot Magic and that was causing some conflicts to where I had to completely "wipe" my drive and start over. I believe I have Lilo saved to the MBR. I'm dual booting with Win98 currently. By your description, your setup sounds a little more involved than mine. If you need me to try and pull some specific info off my machine, I'll give it a try. It would have to be later tonight before I could get back to you (Pacific Time).

Here's my machine specs:

AMD 900 Mhz T-bird
Asus A7V Mainboard (ATA100 Promise disabled)
BIOS Ver 1011
384 MB PC133 Crucia (256) & Kingston (128) CAS 3
IBM Deskstar 13 Gig 66 ATA
Acer 50x CDROM
Diamond MX400 Soundcard
STB Velocity 4400 16 MB Graphics
Logitech Internet Keyboard
Logitech TrackMan Marble Wheel (USB, adapted to PS/2)
SuperMicro Tower
Enermax 430W PS

Win98
Slackware 8.0 (kernel bare245.i)

Well I had the same problem when I wanted to set up LILO on my Slack box. What I did was tell Slack to install LILO to my MBR automatically, and it didn't work. I then told it to install on my HD, but still didn't work.

I always got a error taht LILO couldn't be installed when I used the simple install of lilo. So what I did was following:

I chose the expert install for LILO, and it wasn't very hard to set it up. Once I did that I didn't get the error that LILO couldn't be installed properly.

To do the LILO in expert mode:

1) Start with a new LILO Header
2) Add a linux partition, the one where you installed Slack on.
3) Install.

Hope this works for you.

I had a similar problem with salck and ReiserFS. If you choose a special kernel at boot time, the system boots fine so its nothing to do with Linux, its the kernel that gets installed 2.2.19 or 2.4.5 by default. They have no support for ata100, just the kernel you used to boot your installation had that support and so the system panics. Try booting into installation using that ata100.i kernel, then once the installation is finished dont reboot but cd into slakware/kernels directory on the slack CD and copy ata100.i kernel to / of your installation, then manually edit /etc/lilo.cong adding that kernel to lilo, then run /sbin/lilo and i hope that would solve it. Basically i think the default kernel you are booting with has no ata100 support you need so you have to get the ata100 kernel and boot with it, also try putting into a standalone floppy and booting with it since you actually might have two problems.
One that the LILO stops at LI and doesn't boot which i dont remember what is the solution, i had the same problem some time ago..
and Two that kernel panics because it's missing ata100 support, my suggestion of using a ata100 kernel instead of the default one should solve the second problem and you should be able to boot into linux from where you can tweak LILO then...
Hope that helps

-NSKL

Lilo on the Hard drive, when you select MBR, probably doesn't have support added in for booting past 1052, adding lba32 into the top of lilo.conf somewhere and re-running lilo may fix it.

On the Floppy Slackware might have installed a boot kernel along the lines of bare.i, not ata100.i, so that's probably why its flipping out in init as the kernel didn't find /dev/hde2 while booting.

Or, possibly there's just some confusion in the lilo.conf file for the floppy. You may want to check the floppy (I've never had to create one of these, so I'm playing this a little blind) and see if it has /dev/hde2 as the boot device, also that its pointed at a kernel that you actually have somewhere on /dev/hde, also check to see with fsck if /dev/hde2 is toggled bootable, also make certain it also has the lba32 option.

Okay, that's everything I can think of for now.

Luck,

Finegan