[lug] Newbie Needs Help on Installation

[Wayde Allen]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Calvin Dodge wrote:

> Wayde Allen wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Calvin Dodge wrote:
> > 
> > > Lilo really needs to have the boot partition on the primary hard drive (the
> > > rest of Linux can reside on the slave drive).
> > 
> > That isn't really true is it?  Perhaps this is an IDE restriction?
> 
> I honestly don't know.
> 
> What I do know is that (perhaps due to some nugget of knowledge I've yet to
> learn - that LBA setting, perhaps?) most of the time I've had trouble when I
> put the boot partition on a drive other than the primary one.  OTOH, I've never
> had that problem if I put it on the primary drive (under the 1024 cylinder
> limit, of course).
> 
> This works for me, but my belief in the matter certainly doesn't qualify as
> canonical Linux fact.

I've installed on multiple drives before, but here at work I usually work
with SCSI disk controllers.  Some of the other comments here about BIOS
issues are probably more correct.  I don't think I've ever tried
installing a 10 Gbyte drive, and hence have never had any of the large
disk problems mentioned.  If the IDE slave is somehow not bootable, I
could see that being a problem too.

- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)