I'm currently dual booting redhat 7.0 and windows 2000 adv. server and booting into linux via boot disk.

I just downloaded and compiled kernel-2.4.18.

bzimage said after successfully compiling that the kernel was too big for a floppy and so I wanted to configure LILO to boot from the hard disk. When I run LILO from the command line, it kicks back the following error:

Warning device 0x0306 exceeds 1024 cylinder limit
Fatal: sector 28903800 too large for linear mode (try 'lba32' instead) I suspect this means that LILO hasn't been installed correctly.

So I have the following questions:

Is there an easy way to reinstall LILO?

Is Win2K Adv. Server not allowing LILO to work with the Master Boot Record?

How can I force LILO to work with the MBR?

Any Suggestions (besides "format c:" !!)?

have u turned on lba mode for ur HDD from BIOS ?

you need to put the lba32 option in lilo.conf. it should look something like this:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
lba32
...

i just pasted that from the top of my lilo.conf - yours might be a bit different. but all you need to do is get the lba32 near the top, under the other basic stuff. after that, run lilo to install it, and reboot. that should fix it for the 1024 limit.

Don't listen to me until you are absolutely sure what you are doing.
It might be that win2k boot loader is not letting lilo install in the mbr. So if you do a fdisk /mbr from DOS to erase anything in the mbr and then install lilo it might work. However first try everything else since if you do this you migh stay without any bootloader which means you will maybe have to format and reinstall everything.

Hope this helps, and again this should be the very last thing to try and only if you have your stuff backed up since you might not be able to access your OSes after doing this. Well i assume you could always use a bootdosk to get into your OS...

-Nskl

well, thank you all for the responses... I have gone with my better judgement and formated my windows partitions... I only installed win2k adv.ser. to experiment with it... and to say the least, I was not impressed!

I've pretty much reformatted the whole system and have successfully installed LILO.

I recompiled 2.4.18 and am at the final stage (editing lilo.conf).

I have a few questions about this proceedure that the how-to's seem to breeze through without enough detail. after running make bzImage, I found a file named "bzImage" in /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/ and i think the is my newly compiled kernel. however the is another file named "vmlinux" in /usr/src/linux/ which I am unsure of.

My /boot/ directory has a symbolic link "vmlinuz" which point to "vmlinuz-2.2.16-22". there is also the "vmlinux-2.2.16-22" file within /boot/ which i am unsure of.

Can anyone tell me what the next step is to enable LILO to boot my new kernel?

the vmlinuz is a symbolic link that points to the vmlinuz-2.2.16-22 kernel image file. so the actual kernel running is the vmlinuz-2.2.16-22.

what you need to do is to copy the compiled kernel image to the boot directory and reset the symbolic link.

cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18
rm vmlinuz
ln -s vmlinuz-2.4.18 vmlinuz

and that should do it.

i think the /usr/src/linux/vmlinux file is the uncompressed kernel image. i'm actually not positive about this, but i've compiled many a kernel, and never found a use for that file. i think you'll need to browse some kernel hacking sites to find out what it is. that, or just ignore it.

Thanks for the clarification... alas there is a new error!

cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18
rm vmlinuz
ln -s vmlinuz-2.4.18 vmlinuz

i then ran lilo to check the config...

lilo now says:

added linux
fatal: no images have been defined.

any suggestions?

Post your lilo.conf file it is helpful to track errors down.