I've installed Mandrake 10.1 in the last 8GB of my drive (plenty of space for my needs), but for some reason LILO won't show itself at boot, and strangely enough the Mandrake 10.1 installation didn't offer me the option to create a boot diskette ?!?!

This computer also contains WinXP, and I once added LILO to the boot.ini file by running the following commnad (from within linux):
# dd if=/dev/sda8 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

and then adding the line:
C:\BOOTSECT.LNX="Mandrake Linux"

To the boot.ini file, and all works perfectly, and I was able to load LILO from within Windows' boot menu.

BUT, how can I now load my installed Mandrake considering the info in the subject...???


Thanks in advance!
Tom

maybe the rescue mode helps. Insert the installation CD, press F1 for more options and then type in rescue - I think this is what you do; just read the screen for the exact info. Maybe it gives an option to reinstall lilo. If it doesn't, you should be able to get to a command prompt and install lilo by hand.

I've installed Mandrake 10.1 in the last 8GB of my drive (plenty of space for my needs),

In most cases the /boot directory MUST occur within the first 1024 (or is it 2048) "tracks" of the HDD or else the system will not boot even if you have everything else properly configured.

Usually I place a small /boot partition for Linux "low" on the hard drive, followed by a swap, XP then finally Linux itself.

If the /boot partition is low, then once Linux starts loading it will be able to deal with the linux root partition(s) which may be beyond the limits.

quatsch - I'll try the rescue option and see which options is offers (maybe it even allows booting into the already installed OS as a boot diskette will do).

opjose - what do you think the size of this /boot partition should be?
(take into account that I need a small installation only for Linux/Linux Networking services learning)

Thanks.

I leave a /boot partition of about 64 to 128 megs which should suffice for any foreseeable kernel combination.

Even that is a bit of overkill though I'm using fairly large (200+ gig) drives..

the 1024 cylinder limitation of lilo is obsolete. You should have no problems with your current setup. my boot partiton starts at cylinder 1307.

Eh, no.

I'm not sure what the current cutoff is, but the /boot area from which the kernel is loaded still must be below some limit.

This is more of a bios/HD issue than it is a linux / lilo / grub problem.

lilo has a -L switch which generates a 32-bit block address (see man lilo). You've got to have a pretty damn huge harddrive to bust this limit (nothing you would have on a desktop). It will only be a problem on a system with no LBA support but if the disk has 8GB to spare after a full windows install, I'm sure it has LBA support.

Thanks.

I'll try that.

Although I've found for instance, that on my HP Pavilion Laptop with a 60 gig HDD that Linux will not boot unless I place the /boot partition first.

Once this is done, I've had no problems

I ran accross this with Mandrake 9.2 and have held over the same partitioning with Mandrake 10 as well.

(Or is it Windows XP that had the problem forcing me to do this for Linux?)

I ended up with

/boot
SWAP
/Windows
/Linux_Root

On the same drive.

I have a 60G hd myself and the order I have now is

windows
/boot
linux partitions

which works fine. I've also had the /boot partition much later on the disk and it was fine, too. You put lilo onto the MBR, right?

Yeah it's on the MBR.

Given your post, I'm doubting my recollection.

Heh.

A very strange situation!!!

I've just managed installing and booting to Mandrake 10.0 !!!
Tried exactly the same settings as I did with Mandy 10.1 but with 10.0 it worked!!! I managed to load the OS and login.

But, some of my devices were not detected properly (like my onboard 3COM 3C940 1GBE controller).
I know Mandy 10.1 detects it properly during the install, so I though about upgrading the working Mandy 10.0 to 10.1.
But, after I selected "Upgrade Mandrake Linux release 10.0 (Community)" in the Mandy 10.1 installation, at the next stage (it jumpted straight to Partitioning), it only gave me an error:
"An error occurred
Oops, no root partition."

Why the f**k Mandy 10.1 has a problem with root partitions in my system ???
Why can't it work where the previous release did ???
Could it be that this is a bug with Mandy 10.1?
Could a BIOS update fix this?


BTW, in my Mandy 10.0 installed LILO I have 2 additional options than with the LILO installed by Mandy 10.1:
Linux-enterprise
Linux-smp

Both load the OS properly.

I also checked and the "Linux" option works fine too.

I've opened a new thread for this issue, as right now the center of the problem is different from the topic (subject) of this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=239372

For those who might be interested, this problem was probably caused by a problem in the partition table.
When I tried installing Fedora 2, just before the disk druid stage of the installation it gave me a warning regarding such a problem.
After a low level format the problem was solved.