Re: [Sheflug] Boot Problem: LILO or BIOS?

[James Wallbank <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Peter and Andrew,

Thanks for your suggestions.

I tried adding the line 'fix-table' to /etc/lilo.conf (is this right?)
and rerunning LILO but with no joy. I still get LIL-.

I suspect that the disk size issue may be a red herring: the root
partition is just 250mB. However, I did spot something strange: in
/etc/lilo.conf I read the line:

boot=/dev/sda6

sda6 is a swap partition! Of course, I changed this to /dev/sda5 and (of
course) checked with fdisk that sda5 was marked as bootable, NOT sda6.
(It was - sda6 has never been marked as bootable... so why...?)

I reran LILO and rebooted, but, again, to no effect. I agree with you,
Peter, that maybe something about the install was subtley screwed up
when the jumpers and SCSI BIOS settings were wrong.

Then again, I'm reluctant to reinstall when things seem potentially so
close to resolution. Especially as I can boot from floppy without a
problem... Any more suggestions, or shall I go ahead and start again?

Cheers,

James
=====

On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 10:45, Peter Duffy wrote:
> I always thought that the cylinder 1023 limit was a problem with IDE
> disks only: usually, because SCSI adapters load their own BIOS, they
> handle translation issues themselves. I could be wrong of course, but as
> far as I recollect, I've only personally hit such issues with IDE disks.
> 
> James, the installation should have detected the SCSI controller
> (support for Advansys has been fully mature for several years) and the
> support should be built into the installation kernel. Personally, if I
> were faced with similar issues, my first thought at this point would be
> to do another install from scratch: now that the SCSI BIOS is correctly
> configured, the autodetection might see something slightly differently.
> (Only a hunch, but might be worth a go.)
> 
> 
> I also think it's a good idea to try using a /boot partition of about 30
> meg., in the first few cylinders, as well as a / partition. If you've
> got the time and persistence(!) I'd keep this as a second line, however:
> try a straight reinstall first (otherwise if it works, you won't know
> what fixed the problem!) 
> 
> On Mon, 2002-05-20 at 21:40, Andrew Basterfield wrote:
> > LIL- means you have a corrupt file descriptor table(?), probably caused by
> > a geometry mismatch. Do you have a huge / partition (over 2 gigs)? It's
> > probably caused by the BIOS not using the correct geometry because it's
> > lobotomized to retain compatibility back to 1982. 
> > 
> > Try 'fix-table' in the global section of /etc/lilo.conf
> 
> 
> ___________________________________________________________________
> 
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> 
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> 
-- 
James Wallbank
Redundant Technology Initiative
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T: +44 (0)114 2495522
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  GNU the choice of a complete generation.