Good news and bad news.

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

Hi, well at last I've had a little luck and managed to install Gentoo. But now when I run lilo I get an error message saying

MacMasta · Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2003 3:33 am Post subject:

First: any reason you can't use grub? It's superior in many ways.

I seem to remember this as a non-problem in an old debian install of mine; one of those weird bootloader bugs that sounds horrific and actually isn't a problem at all - although you shouldn't necessarily take my word for it.

The boot-time messages from the kernel can be viewed using dmesg; logs are in /var/log/everything/current - without more information, the rest is hard to troubleshoot.

~Mac~

keratos68 · Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2003 7:21 am Post subject:

MacMasta · Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2003 8:08 am Post subject:

But if lilo's having issues, why not grub?

Anyway, this most likely isn't a bootloader issue, and we need to know more before we can take on other problems.

~Mac~

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

Hi, well personally I don't care which bootloader I use, I trust you will forgive me for thinking that overall this is pretty much irrelevant. In answer to the question however, I will say I used lilo, becuase i couldn't get Grub to install properly, call it inexperience, call it a symptpm of what I havedescribed above, I really don't know. But the bottom line was, lilo worked where grub diddn't.

Both in the bios and in lilo, I'm addressing my disks with lba, I will try some other settings, but I'm not certain if this is the problem. In literal terms however, does anybody know what this message is saying? The disk is nothing special, just an ordinary 120 Gig IBM deskstar (fairly common these days). It is also disk two of two. So is this even the disk lilo is talking about?
If the disk is bade or something I will buy another disk to fix it

Your input is invaluable.

Thanks again.

Q

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

Oh yeah, - and what about that boot log file? Where am I likely to find that? If I could find that I could post the relevant parts here.

Thanks once again.

Q

bsolar · Bodhisattva Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 2764

The message basically says that the BIOS is reporting a geometry (1024 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors) and the system another (59131 cylinders, 16 heads, 255 sectors)

It might be that your BIOS is old and cannot count cylinders above the 1024 one? For the BIOS your disk is a 8.4GB one (1024*255*63*512K=~8.4GB) typical for old BIOS'es.

If this is the case you might be interested in the Large Disk HOWTO.

If not check that you have not set the geometry by hand somewhere in the BIOS or in the LILO configuration.
_________________
I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

Thanks for that. Well I certainly haven't altered anything by hand. I simply copied the lilo config file from the install instructions and changed it to point to my kernel /boot/bxImage and to my / directoty, hdb3. I just checked my bios and lilio config, both are marked as LBA. My motherboard is a KT400A, so in terms of newness, that's possibly about as new as you can get. My drives are however fairly large, I have a total of about 360GB 2x internal and 1x external. So if there is something I need to do in Gentoo to get it to work properly with these disks I'd be very keen to know.

Again if I could just see a full log of the boot up process maybe I could get a better clue what's going on Does metalog write a file like this anywhere?

Q

raid517 · l33t Joined: 06 Mar 2003 Posts: 946

Well I read the how to. I didn't spot it originally as I'm still finding my way around lynx. Unfortunately that's more information than I ever cared to know about Harddisk geometry. Perhaps the answer is in there somewhere, but to be honset, most of it just sounds like double dutch to me. I am sadly, not very technically minded. In any case I know from experience that modern versions of Linux should be able to handle these disks without difficulty. Indeed reading this guide confirms this and highlights the point that it is only in some certain unusual circumstances that this might not be the case. I can't say for sure, but I shouldn't think my set up is all that unusual. I have an Athlon XP 2600+, a VIA KT400A motherboard, 512MB DDR 400. So all in all a fairly bog standard everyday set-up. Modern, yes, fast reasonably, unusual... I shouldn't expect so, although perhaps someone could correct me? If anybody has a suggestion or an idea about what might be going on and/or how to fix it, I would be very grateful.

FYI, when I do look in the bios, this is what I see for the second disk: