Over the weekend I splurged and picked up a new Maxtor MaxLine III
300GB HD for my new system. I've been able to install Linux (Slackware
10.1), but lilo has been giving me a little bit of grief (actually the
whole thing has... I hope this isn't a faulty HD issue). I'm thinking
it MIGHT have to do with how I have my disk partitioned, but wanted to
run it by someone to see if that's what the problem actually is.

On my drive, I have many partitions, mostly Logical ones. Here's the
map:

PRI - /dev/hda1 - 10GB - Windows OS
PRI - /dev/hda2 - 30GB - Windows Apps
PRI - /dev/hda3 - 215GB - Shared Data (FAT32 partition readable from
Linux)
EXT - /dev/hda5 - 10GB - Linux /
EXT - /dev/hda6 - 20GB - Linux /usr
EXT - /dev/hda7 - 5GB - Linux /var
EXT - /dev/hda8 - 10GB - Linux /home

Now, my kernel is being placed in /boot, which is on /dev/hda5, which
is a logical partition. When I run lilo, it's kinda flaky. Most times I
only get it to work using 'liloconfig' and installing to /dev/hda5
itself. I have not been successful yet writing this to the MBR of the
drive... it always gives me an error.

When I did this the first time (I had to repartition/reformat/reinstall
about 5 times yesterday alone), it seemed to work. I rebooted and lilo
came up and I was able to get in no prob. Then I made the mistake of
trying to modify my kernel (actually tried to upgrade to 2.6.11.7) and
lilo continued to give me grief about the MBR and now wouldn't even
install to /dev/hda5 directly itself! So when I rebooted, it tried to
boot from the CD and then gave me a bunch of '99's on the screen just
before hanging.

So the big question is, is lilo giving me this problem because my
kernel is on an Extended/Logical partition that begins over 250GB into
the disk? Would it make a difference if the partition the kernel is was
a Primary partition instead of a logical one?

Also, as for the Windows partitions, I haven't yet installed Windows
onto those partitions, and honestly, I'd prefer to use them strictly as
a Windows install through something like vmware or bochs as opposed to
doing a dual-boot (not even sure if that's possible).

Any thoughts?

TIA!

- skubik.

On 18 Apr 2005 09:08:09 -0700 skubik <shawn.kubik@gmail.com> wrote:

| On my drive, I have many partitions, mostly Logical ones. Here's the
| map:
|
| PRI - /dev/hda1 - 10GB - Windows OS
| PRI - /dev/hda2 - 30GB - Windows Apps
| PRI - /dev/hda3 - 215GB - Shared Data (FAT32 partition readable from
| Linux)
| EXT - /dev/hda5 - 10GB - Linux /
| EXT - /dev/hda6 - 20GB - Linux /usr
| EXT - /dev/hda7 - 5GB - Linux /var
| EXT - /dev/hda8 - 10GB - Linux /home

I'd recommend making partition 3 be extended and having the linux
logical partitions, and partition 4 be the big shared data. That
gets linux closer to the front in case that is the issue. It is
mostly historical now, but you never know.


| Now, my kernel is being placed in /boot, which is on /dev/hda5, which
| is a logical partition. When I run lilo, it's kinda flaky. Most times I
| only get it to work using 'liloconfig' and installing to /dev/hda5
| itself. I have not been successful yet writing this to the MBR of the
| drive... it always gives me an error.

This is where I would do things more manually, like editing the lilo.conf
file directly, and running the lilo command directly. I regularly do
things directly, anyway.


| When I did this the first time (I had to repartition/reformat/reinstall
| about 5 times yesterday alone), it seemed to work. I rebooted and lilo
| came up and I was able to get in no prob. Then I made the mistake of
| trying to modify my kernel (actually tried to upgrade to 2.6.11.7) and
| lilo continued to give me grief about the MBR and now wouldn't even
| install to /dev/hda5 directly itself! So when I rebooted, it tried to
| boot from the CD and then gave me a bunch of '99's on the screen just
| before hanging.

Some kind of geometry problem, but it could be the distance from the
beginning of the disk.


| So the big question is, is lilo giving me this problem because my
| kernel is on an Extended/Logical partition that begins over 250GB into
| the disk? Would it make a difference if the partition the kernel is was
| a Primary partition instead of a logical one?

Possible. The switch of partitions 3 and 4 should get linux closer to
the front. But it could be a geometry problem where sometimes it gets
the geomtry information from the kernel and sometimes from the BIOS.
And I've seen cases where one of them had it wrong. On a couple machine
I had, I had to literally tell the BIOS what geometry to use to get lilo
to boot up. The default setting would never work with any combination
of lilo configs.


| Also, as for the Windows partitions, I haven't yet installed Windows
| onto those partitions, and honestly, I'd prefer to use them strictly as
| a Windows install through something like vmware or bochs as opposed to
| doing a dual-boot (not even sure if that's possible).

It's possible ... but dual-boot means one at a time. As you get more into
any system, but it linux or windows, you tend to just keep on going and not
want to reboot into the other. The vmware approach might be more fun since
you can have both at the same time.

--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

skubik wrote:
> Over the weekend I splurged and picked up a new Maxtor MaxLine III
> 300GB HD for my new system. I've been able to install Linux (Slackware
> 10.1), but lilo has been giving me a little bit of grief (actually the
> whole thing has... I hope this isn't a faulty HD issue). I'm thinking
> it MIGHT have to do with how I have my disk partitioned, but wanted to
> run it by someone to see if that's what the problem actually is.
>
> On my drive, I have many partitions, mostly Logical ones. Here's the
> map:
>
> PRI - /dev/hda1 - 10GB - Windows OS
> PRI - /dev/hda2 - 30GB - Windows Apps
> PRI - /dev/hda3 - 215GB - Shared Data (FAT32 partition readable from
> Linux)
> EXT - /dev/hda5 - 10GB - Linux /
> EXT - /dev/hda6 - 20GB - Linux /usr
> EXT - /dev/hda7 - 5GB - Linux /var
> EXT - /dev/hda8 - 10GB - Linux /home
>
> Now, my kernel is being placed in /boot, which is on /dev/hda5, which
> is a logical partition. When I run lilo, it's kinda flaky. Most times I
> only get it to work using 'liloconfig' and installing to /dev/hda5
> itself. I have not been successful yet writing this to the MBR of the
> drive... it always gives me an error.
>
> When I did this the first time (I had to repartition/reformat/reinstall
> about 5 times yesterday alone), it seemed to work. I rebooted and lilo
> came up and I was able to get in no prob. Then I made the mistake of
> trying to modify my kernel (actually tried to upgrade to 2.6.11.7) and
> lilo continued to give me grief about the MBR and now wouldn't even
> install to /dev/hda5 directly itself! So when I rebooted, it tried to
> boot from the CD and then gave me a bunch of '99's on the screen just
> before hanging.
>
> So the big question is, is lilo giving me this problem because my
> kernel is on an Extended/Logical partition that begins over 250GB into
> the disk? Would it make a difference if the partition the kernel is was
> a Primary partition instead of a logical one?
>
> Also, as for the Windows partitions, I haven't yet installed Windows
> onto those partitions, and honestly, I'd prefer to use them strictly as
> a Windows install through something like vmware or bochs as opposed to
> doing a dual-boot (not even sure if that's possible).
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> TIA!
>
> - skubik.
>
One thing I have always stuck to - and never come to grief because of:
Make the first partition a 'small' (say 100MB) /boot-partition. After
that, do whatever you like, but personally I then have all my
windoze-stuff and then all the linux-stuff. Also - incase of needing to
reinstall windows, I leave the old dos-loader in MBR and set the
boot-flag to hda1 (or hda2 if I need to reinstall windows, then back to
hda1 again afterwards). To swap the boot-flag around is relatively
painless - any 'live cd' will do.

So - typically what I have is:
hda1, 100MB, /boot
hda2, ~16GB, windows
hda3, ~8GB, / (linux root)
hda4, extended - remainder of disk
hda5, 2 x memory, swap
hda6, whatever, vfat for common transfers
hda7, x GB, /disk - anything unix-related _but_ the OS itself (users, etc)


If you are really adventureous, I suggest hda8, hda9 etc, each of which
is 8 gigs (or thereabout) for the /-filesystem of different
distributions ... :-)

Good luck!

-pbh-

On 18 Apr 2005 09:08:09 -0700, "skubik" <shawn.kubik@gmail.com> wrote:

>Over the weekend I splurged and picked up a new Maxtor MaxLine III
>300GB HD for my new system. I've been able to install Linux (Slackware
>10.1), but lilo has been giving me a little bit of grief (actually the
>whole thing has... I hope this isn't a faulty HD issue). I'm thinking
>it MIGHT have to do with how I have my disk partitioned, but wanted to
>run it by someone to see if that's what the problem actually is.
>
>On my drive, I have many partitions, mostly Logical ones. Here's the
>map:
>
>PRI - /dev/hda1 - 10GB - Windows OS
>PRI - /dev/hda2 - 30GB - Windows Apps
>PRI - /dev/hda3 - 215GB - Shared Data (FAT32 partition readable from
>Linux)
>EXT - /dev/hda5 - 10GB - Linux /
>EXT - /dev/hda6 - 20GB - Linux /usr
>EXT - /dev/hda7 - 5GB - Linux /var
>EXT - /dev/hda8 - 10GB - Linux /home
>

If you install the LILO boot record on /dev/hda5, how do you get to it? Most
loaders on the MBR will only boot an active Primary partition.

As long as your BIOS supports the EDD BIOS calls, any version of LILO after
21.4 should work. You MUST use "lba32" disk addressing. LILO, using these
BIOS calls can support disks up to 2Tb (2048Gb).

Put the LILO boot record on the MBR (/dev/hda), and boot Windows with:
other=/dev/hda1

The 215Gb FAT32 partition may be a problem. In my Windows experience, 32Gb is
the useful limit for FAT32 partitions. However, this is of no concern to
LILO.

--John

>Now, my kernel is being placed in /boot, which is on /dev/hda5, which
>is a logical partition. When I run lilo, it's kinda flaky. Most times I
>only get it to work using 'liloconfig' and installing to /dev/hda5
>itself. I have not been successful yet writing this to the MBR of the
>drive... it always gives me an error.
>
>When I did this the first time (I had to repartition/reformat/reinstall
>about 5 times yesterday alone), it seemed to work. I rebooted and lilo
>came up and I was able to get in no prob. Then I made the mistake of
>trying to modify my kernel (actually tried to upgrade to 2.6.11.7) and
>lilo continued to give me grief about the MBR and now wouldn't even
>install to /dev/hda5 directly itself! So when I rebooted, it tried to
>boot from the CD and then gave me a bunch of '99's on the screen just
>before hanging.
>
>So the big question is, is lilo giving me this problem because my
>kernel is on an Extended/Logical partition that begins over 250GB into
>the disk? Would it make a difference if the partition the kernel is was
>a Primary partition instead of a logical one?
>
>Also, as for the Windows partitions, I haven't yet installed Windows
>onto those partitions, and honestly, I'd prefer to use them strictly as
>a Windows install through something like vmware or bochs as opposed to
>doing a dual-boot (not even sure if that's possible).
>
>Any thoughts?
>
>TIA!
>
>- skubik.