[lug] Giveaway + Lilo/LI question

[RADKE JOSHUA PAUL]

Greets,

Firstly, I have a stripped down K6II (300?) system I'd like to give away,
or give away for whatever donation you might like.  The system has _only_
the mobo (don't remember which motherboard right now), case, and power
supply - so it really isn't worth much to me.  I live in Boulder, so if
you're interested, just e-mail me privately.

Secondly, while I hate to raise this issue yet again (I've been through
all of the messages returned by searching for lilo on the blug archive
--- plenty of great info there!), I just can't seem to get lilo up and
running correctly.

My first question is:  Has anybody gotten LILO to boot from /dev/hdb by
specifying HDD-1 (primary slave) at the first boot choice in the bios? 
I've seen a lot of discussion of getting it to co-exist with windoze on
the MBR, and suggestions that lilo can happily boot off of any disk the
bios claims to be able to boot from, but I haven't seen specific examples
of success with this configuration.

Ok, the specific information.  RedHat 6.2.  /dev/hda is windoze 98 SE, and
/dev/hdb is linux.  /dev/hdb is set (manually) in the bios to be run in
LBA mode - and the RedHat installation (and fdisk) was run with the bios
in that mode.  /dev/hdb1 is bootable (fdisk), and resides on cylinders 1-7
(or 1-8?), and is 32 MB (or so).  When booting with HDD-1 the first boot
device, it prints LI and stops.  If I disable HDD-0 (/dev/hda, as
suggested by someone else), before I get to LI, I get the dreaded 01 01 01
01 01, ad nauseum.  I can boot easily from a floppy, but am too stubborn
to accept this 'solution'.  A utility (I belive it is called hdparam or
something?) reports the same geometry as the BIOS does for the hard drive.

I'm at work, so I apologize for not having my lilo.conf file ... but I
have fiddled with many of the options (especially the famous linear one).
When I run /sbin/lilo I get a warning that hdb is not the first drive, and
I assume this is archaic, as ony the first drive was bootable in recent
years?

Not long ago, I went through the same growing pains trying to boot from
/dev/hdc, and as far as I can tell, the symptoms are identical (I moved
the drive after several sources reported that LILO only worked
consistently on the primary IDE bus).

I'm pretty much at a dead end now.  The only 2 things I can think of doing
would be to repartition the windoze drive and put /boot there, or to swap
the primary/master jumpers on the two drives.  Finally (ok, maybe 3), I
could physically disconnect the primary master and/or use dos fdisk /mbr
on the linux drive before reinstalling lilo.  These options seem more
extreme than what I'd _like_ to do, but I'll do them if necessary, since
I'll be able to work at home _much_ better with a functional linux. 

Any help would be appreciated,
                                Josh

**********************
Joshua Radke
Research Ass't
Univ. of CO, Boulder
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