On PC herited from a friend, running
Windows XP but containing a second hard disk with
about 150 GB, I want to install Linux
(maybe Slackware AND SuSE or Ubuntu) together
with Win XP (on an enlarged partition) in
dual boot.
I'd like to use LILO as the boot loader, but only
if the 1024 cylinder limit ( = about 8GB ) does not apply.
Somewhere I read that newer versions of LILO
allow this .... which ones ?

what does this limit?
i used lilo on a hard drive that had partitions with definitely much more than 8GB. no problem.

It was an imposed limitation of legacy BIOS's that could not boot beyond 8GB i.e 1024 cylinders. It is no longer a limitation but how old is this PC?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder_1024
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

michaelk,
thank you for the two links. I had already
visited those pages before asking Linuxquestions.

This is why for example I identify ~8GB with 1024 cylinders
(running "fdisk -l" inside a Linux Live CD session, I found
geometry was 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1 sector = 512 bytes ;
the first disk, which contains a single partition
with Windows XP , then has size 8455Mb = 1027 cylinders).

As to the age of my PC :
The motherboard is a FUJITSU SIEMENS, model D1875,
and the (Phoenix) BIOS is version 5.00 R1.02.1875,
date 14/04/2004 .

I am planning to copy the Win XP partition to the beginning
of my second disk (19457 cylinders in all), so any /boot partition for
Linux will reside well beyond cylinder 1024 ...
Please comment.
diogenes

nevermind.