Lilo 1024 cylinder limititation
 

I'm having trouble trying to boot from lilo using my backup kernel. I have instructions in a book I got for how to do it, but apparently one of my partitions must be crossing over the 1024 cylinder barrier. I would repartition it using PartitionMagic, except I can only specify partition sizes in megabytes and not the cylyinders they reside in. Please find another program that can do this for me or other help.

the 1024th culyinder is at around 8.4gb. your /boot must be inside that

Does that mean only my Linux partition needs to be within the 1024 boundary or will I have to resize my fat32 partition as well?

Lilo no longer has that limit, so unless you have an old BIOS you can just add the line lba32 in the top section on /etc/lilo.conf and run /sbin/lilo.

You may have to upgrade to the most recent version of lilo first though.

How do I find out what version of Lilo I have and what's the latest version. Also I need to know whether or not I need to resize my fat32 partition.

well, if your windows partition is bigger than 1024 cyl, then nayurally, you need to make it smaller, thus letting /boot be inside that limit.

lilo >= 21.7 doesn'thave this problem, but i'd guess that your distro has an older version, and is stuck with it, assuming you can't get in to upgrade it. your version : lilo --version i expect.

I'm not sure that will get rid of the problem since when I installed my Western Digital hard drive after running their Data Lifeguard Tools it told me there was some low-level bios hard drive problem that needed to be dealt with. The odd part is when I was still using Windows 98 and ME I needed to have Western Digital's software apply a dynamic drive overlay to correct the problem, but when I reformatted my hard drive and installed Windows XP Home Edition I never needed it again.

dynamic drive overlay? never heard of it... do you mean ezbios? if so then linux certainly doesn't need it, and i'd guess that new M$ os's don't either, win98 definitely does tho

According to my Western Digital manual some bioses have a limitation that prevents them from accessing the full capacity of 8.4 gb hard drives or larger ones and is sometimes a limitation present in operating systems. Apparently the bios must support extended bios funtions meaning even if an operating system is free of this limitation the bios may still cause problems. Western Digital also says if the limitation affects you its Data Lifeguard EZ-install software can correct this.

Unless your system is ancient, drive overlay software is not needed. Any hard drive you buy will have software with it, but that doesn't mean you need it. Even if your motherboard and bios are a little older, download an update and flash the bios up to date, which most have. If your BIOS says it supports LBA then you'll have no problems just adding the LBA32 line to lilo.conf.

I have an FIC AZ-11 which supports ATA66, 4x agp, 200mhz bus Amd cpus with integrated sound, but serious or not I need to get the bios issue fixed and FIC hasn't released any bios updates relating to this. I would call tech support and tell them the problem exists, but I'm not even sure if they would listen to me. This may and may not affect Linux, but it still needs to be fixed. I also need the web address of where I can get the latest lilo release.

Any version of lilo greater than 21.3 will work beyond the 1024 cylinder. To check your version, type "lilo -T".
If you need to upgrade, the download is here.

How do I install the new version of Lilo?

download it, and follow the relevant instructions. You really should try and have a go at sorting things like that out for yourself, just posting and waiting for an answer might take ages, and won't teach you nearly as much as finding your own solution would. i'd guess your distro isn't rpm based, so you'll need to do it from tar.gz, installtion instructions for them is on this site at least 20 times id say, probably more.

21.3, 21.7... i couldn't properly remember... i think i've got 21.3.7 on my server, which is why i'm confused... i knew it was one of them, honest!

Actually you need to update to version 22.1 and until I get the hang of Linux you may see a lot of questions. I've known MS-DOS since I was six and have constantly been learning new things about it and I still haven't fully mastered it so it may be a while before I understand Linux completely.