[lug] Newbie Needs Help on Installation

[Sebastian Sobolewski ( Zeb )]

>
>The only restriction I know of is that the
>root (or boot) partition needs to reside below 1024 cylinders.  For a
>second disk this would almost be a given since the root partition would
>start basically at the beginning.


         The 1024 cyl restriction is a BIOS problem.  I have successfully 
booted Linux boxes with the /boot partition well above the 1024th cyl on a 
few machines.  As a rule of thumb however this normally doesn't work 
because most BIOS-es don't let you do that.  (Other OSes aka NT also have 
this problem).

         I have seen the 0101010101 problem ton's of times.  It can be 
caused by a whole bunch of things:

         1. Your PC BIOS may not allow booting off a slave device. (I have 
an old Gateway P60 has this problem)
         2. You told lilo to install on /dev/hdbX (where X is 1..?) instead 
of /dev/hdb
         3. Lilo installed on /dev/hda but you moved your hard drive so 
it's no longer on /dev/hda

         For instance if you removed your win98 hard drive and moved your 
"Slave" drive so that it becomes the primary HD and installed Linux when 
you put your HDs back to the way they were before, lilo will no longer load 
right.

         /dev/hda == Master (Primary IDE)
         /dev/hdb == Slave (Primary IDE)
         /dev/hdc == Master (Secondary IDE)
         /dev/hdd == Slave (seondary IDE)

         If you ever want to re-arrange your drives you MUST keep this in 
mind and repoint lilo to the correct partition before the move. Or boot of 
a floppy and repoint lilo to the new setup after moving your drives around.

         The first few times I installed Linux I always removed my other 
drives from the system just incase I screw up.  (IE just to make sure I 
don't loose my data).  50% of the time I ended up with this or the "LI-" 
problem.

         If you can give us more detail on how you installed your system it 
would of great help.

Sebastian