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Hi folks,

I know I'm not the first person to observe this, but
LILO is starting up with L 01 01 01 01... on my older
laptop after I put my 40 gig hard drive in it.
The drive had worked just fine in a newer laptop.
I really prefer the older machine.

I've tried everything it seems, but I still get
the same L 01 01 01 effect. I tried:

* setting LBA32 mode, with no effect
* setting the hard drive CHS geometry, with no effect
I did this:
disk = /dev/hda
bios = 0x80
* running MSDOS fdisk /mbr, which caused an "invalid partition table"
error
* reinstalling LILO, producing the 01 01 error again.
* upgrading the BIOS, to no effect.

Does anyone know what else can be done?

Might GRUB be a better choice than LILO?

Thanks.

harddrivecleaner@yahoo.com wrote:
> I know I'm not the first person to observe this, but
> LILO is starting up with L 01 01 01 01... on my older
> laptop after I put my 40 gig hard drive in it.

Is that surprising? It means what it says. "I ... cannot ... jump ...
there". Your bios can't do that.

> I've tried everything it seems, but I still get
> the same L 01 01 01 effect. I tried:

What's to try? Just put the boot stuff somewhere in reach of yur bios!

> Does anyone know what else can be done?

What do you mean "else"? You haven't done the one thing that you need
to do - put your boot code somewhere where your bios can reach it.


> Might GRUB be a better choice than LILO?

Why? You've proved to yourself quite happily that changing the bios
(putting the disk in another machine) resolves the problem. WHy do
you suggest strange non-solutions after that observation?

There is a small chance that the bios calls that grub writes in the
mbr work in your bis whereas the ones that lilo writes don't. But you
already tried writing different kinds of commands there with lba32,
linear, etc. in lilo. So the odds are that the kind f command makes no
difference and hence its the place those commands are trying t get the
bios to jump to that is the problem!

Make yourself a small /boot partition below cylinder 1024 . What did
lilo -v -v -v say?


Peter

>Make yourself a small /boot partition below cylinder 1024

I had tried that, but it didn't work until
just now, when I did a "fix partition order"
in the Linux fdisk's advanced menu.

It was very odd. Partition 1 was the first
one on the disk, but somehow in the partition
table, not so.

harddrivecleaner@yahoo.com wrote:
>>Make yourself a small /boot partition below cylinder 1024

> I had tried that, but it didn't work until
> just now, when I did a "fix partition order"
> in the Linux fdisk's advanced menu.

Nonsense. The order is unimportant. The placement is.

> It was very odd. Partition 1 was the first
> one on the disk, but somehow in the partition
> table, not so.

So? Who cares! Not your bios, not you. Your bios jumps to disk
coordinates. It doesn't care or know in what partition they are.

Peter

<harddrivecleaner@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1128033249.661323.162430@g47g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> >Make yourself a small /boot partition below cylinder 1024
>
> I had tried that, but it didn't work until
> just now, when I did a "fix partition order"
> in the Linux fdisk's advanced menu.
>
> It was very odd. Partition 1 was the first
> one on the disk, but somehow in the partition
> table, not so.

First: *IGNORE PETER*, he will snark at you to make himself feel like a
manly man, and his suggestions will contain no usable data as he pokes his
nose in the air and says "You're too stupid to know what I know", then he
handwaves soem argument that is usually (though not always) completely
irrelevant.

Second. For certain boot situations, grub is indeed better than LILO. The
key such situation is an old motherboard with certain BIOS limitations, and
a / partition that is not contained entirely within the first 1023 cylinders
of the disk. You can deal with the limitation with creating a /boot
partition at the beginning of that is less than 11023 cylinders long (or 8
Gigabytes with a typical disk layout). So a small 100 Meg /boot directory is
just about the right size for multiple kernels, a few grub config files,
etc.

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

> So a small 100 Meg /boot directory is
> just about the right size for multiple kernels, a few grub config files,
> etc.

I've set up a DOS partition that I boot into, which
then runs the linux.bat from Loadlin. This is probably
better than the LILO boot menu because I can put any
number of kernels there and choose among them, which
is something I actually need.

I don't know if grub would make it any better organized,
it's pretty simple as it is now. Although it might be
nice to have a menu system.

I'm a little hesitant to deal with GRUB though,
since it's associated with the creepy FSF.

Thanks..

harddrivecleaner@yahoo.com wrote:

> I've set up a DOS partition that I boot into, which
> then runs the linux.bat from Loadlin. This is probably
> better than the LILO boot menu because I can put any
> number of kernels there and choose among them, which
> is something I actually need.

Surely the standard LILO installation allows this anyway.

> I don't know if grub would make it any better organized,
> it's pretty simple as it is now. Although it might be
> nice to have a menu system.

LILO and grub both have menu systems, AFAIK.
I use grub, because it does not re-write the MBR
when a new kernel is added,
and I feel that is safer.

> I'm a little hesitant to deal with GRUB though,
> since it's associated with the creepy FSF.

Is it?
I'm rather surprised, as grub prides itself
on being OS independent,
and uses a distinctly non-Unix way of specifying hard disks.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

LILO boot-time code does not care in the least about partition order.

As far as I can tell, the system where you are trying to use the drive does
not support LBA32 addressing, so it falls back to geometric (C:H:S)
addressing, and fails. The former system does support LBA32, hence, it is
able to boot.

The only solution on this older system is to create a boot partition below the
1023 cylinder limit. Then be sure that ALL boot files are down there:
kernels, initrds, & the LILO sector map file (map=). This last is critical.

Booting from DOS works, because DOS is located below the 1023 limit; hence,
you can address everything you need to boot.

--John


On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:45:25 +0200, "Peter T. Breuer" <ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es>
wrote:

>harddrivecleaner@yahoo.com wrote:
>>>Make yourself a small /boot partition below cylinder 1024
>
>> I had tried that, but it didn't work until
>> just now, when I did a "fix partition order"
>> in the Linux fdisk's advanced menu.
>
>Nonsense. The order is unimportant. The placement is.
>
>> It was very odd. Partition 1 was the first
>> one on the disk, but somehow in the partition
>> table, not so.
>
>So? Who cares! Not your bios, not you. Your bios jumps to disk
>coordinates. It doesn't care or know in what partition they are.
>
>Peter

harddrivecleaner@yahoo.com wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I know I'm not the first person to observe this, but
> LILO is starting up with L 01 01 01 01... on my older
> laptop after I put my 40 gig hard drive in it.
> The drive had worked just fine in a newer laptop.
> I really prefer the older machine.

Older bioses can't recognise the geometry of 40G drives. I had this
trouble with a desktop, but I went to the bios's manufacturer web site
and discovered that I could download a new bios for a few tens of
dollars. Fixed the problem and works fine. Put the small drive back,
upgrade the bios, then reinstall your big drive.

--
Ron House house@usq.edu.au
http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/staff/house
Ethics website: http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/staff/house/goodness