Subject: LILO trouble

From: Hakan Ardo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 21:55:54 +0200

Hi,
I have a 486 on which I untill recently had MSDos and Slackware installed on 
two diffrent harddisks, with LILO installed in the master boot block of the 
msdos harddisk allowing me to select between the two operating systems. This 
worked just fine.

Now, I decided to convert into Debian (I just love it's package system), so I 
through out the Slackware stuff and installed the three disks base system. I 
had to install LILO by hand because the instalation package tried to install 
it on the linx partion, which is the second partion on the secon harddisk 
(/dev/hdb2). I placed it on (/dev/hda). Then I rebootet. Then insted of the 
LILO text that is supposed to show up when LILO loads I only got "L" followd 
by "04" repeated in what seemsed to infinity.

I have tried bothe my old Slackware lilo configuration file, the new created 
by Debian. I have tried both the lilo version that came with Debian and the 
old one used by Slackware. I have tried having both the MSDos hd and the Linux 
HD as the first HD. And Gud knows what else, but the result is just the same. 
What am I doing wrong?

I have temporarity solved the problem by using a MSDos boot disk with a menu 
that allows me to either run the startup files from my HD after load MSDOS 
from the floppy, or execute loadlin to load a linux kernerel from my msdos HD 
and mount the root system. And this works acceptable. But it is not a decent 
solution. And since LILO worked with Slackware, I see no reason for it not to 
work with Debian. Any sugestions will be appricialed. Thanx.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------
 Name:      Hakan Ardo
 E-Mail:    [email-masked]
 WWW:       HTTP://www.ub2.lu.se/~hakan/sig.html
 Interests: WWW, Programming, 3D graphics

 Thought for the day: As long as one understands, the
 spelling does not matter :-)
----------------------------------------------------------

---

From: [email-masked] (Bernd Eckenfels)
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 02:54:45 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi,

> by "04" repeated in what seemsed to infinity.

#   0x04   "Sector not found". This typically indicates a geometry mismatch.
#    If you're booting a raw-written disk image, verify whether it was
#    created for disks with the same geometry as the one you're using. If
#    you're booting from a SCSI disk or a large IDE disk, you should check,
#    whether LILO has obtained correct geometry data from the kernel or
#    whether the geometry definition corresponds to the real disk geometry.
#    (See section "Disk geometry".) Removing COMPACT may help too. So may
#    adding LINEAR.

You can see if the Geometry in the Bios is the same as Linux reports on
startup of the kernel. If not, you should specify the geometry in lilo.conf
as you have enterd it in the System Bios.

Greetings
Bernd

PS: read /usr/doc/lilo/Manual.txt (of lilo_19-1.deb).
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