I have P4 on Intel 845D with 2 IDE HDD (each 30 Gb). Disks are connected to first IDE controller (master, slave). On first disk Win XP is installed. I'm trying to install Red Hat 7.1. I install on the second disk (creating two partition / = 10Gb & swap = 1 Gb) starting from first sector. I install LILO on the MBR. During install there was warning about cylinders. After reboot i just have letter 'L' on the screen. I tried to reinstall with creating small partition with mount point /boot (with size 7 Mb) and / = 10 Gb, swap = 1 Gb. But result was the same.

Help, please!

probably due to the 1024 cylinder limit is your problem.... that lilo can't go past to boot properly.. you either need to update to a newer version of lilo and or boot using a boot disk to access linux...

also, you shouldn't need a 1GB swap.. that is a waste of space.

Non-IBM systems are so much less trouble. So far BIOS hacks have been required to get around the 30MB limit, the 1024-Cylinder limit, and now the 8GB limit.

First off, you might try wiping out the disk again, creating a 2GB partition and installing everything into that. If it works, you at least have a starting point. If THAT doesn't do it, check your BIOS setup to make sure the drive's installed in LBA mode.

Another thing that could get you is if you have installed a CMOS hack like EZ-DISK onto that drive, particulaly if you removed the other disk while installing Linux (which isn't necessary). EZ-DISK is stored in its own little mini-partition and it plays games with the other partition numbers to make itself invisible. modern LILO is supposed to handle that, but it might not for some reason.

Hi Buddy,

I had the same prob. My one is a athalon 1.1 gig with gigabyte 7dxr raid board with 40 gigi hard disk. i installed winxp with 5gb partion and made correct partions and installed redhat 7.1 but received so many probs hanging in l and sometimes whe i installed it hangs in li so finally i made a at limitaion partion tha tmeans 2047MG Primary one and installed winxp then installed red hat works fine with me now. I think it's the shit cylinder prob that makes us feel sick.
Anyway now i'm out of space to install software in winxp partion, wondering if i installed partion magic 7 and resize it to 5gb. Mabye it can crash again anyone got a bettr idea hot to resize the partion without loosing both os's?

Just for giggles, you might try Grub - the Grand Unified Bootloader. RedHat 7.2 prefers it to LILO. http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ Any RedHat 7.x system should be able to downloadload and install the RPM. I've seen one or two magazine articles lately extolling the praises of Grub, but haven't been brave (or desparate) enough to switch yet myself.