' There appears to be a bug in the install procedure which results in the "boot=" line of /etc/lilo.conf identifying the wrong device. At least this was so with my particular disk configuration.

Details:



RedHat Linux 6.1: text based custom install

Disk Configuration:
Primary IDE channel: disk 0  Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1583 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             1       686   5510263+  1b  Hidden Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2           687      1019   2674822+  1b  Hidden Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda3   *      1020      1021     16065   83  Linux 

Secondary IDE channel: disk 0 CD ROM
SCSI 0 Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1106 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *         1        16    128488+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sda2            17      1106   8755425    5  Extended
/dev/sda5            17       781   6144831   83  Linux 

From the above you will see that there are 2 IDE drives and one SCSI.  The documentation is pretty clear that given the above configuration that the /boot partition a) must reside on the IDE drive, b) be entirely below cylinder 1024 and c) be no more than 16MB.  You will also see that these conditions have been met.

Prior to the installation I used Partition Magic v5.0 to create and format /dev/hda3 as a Linux  partition.  Also note that PowerQuest''s BootMagic was installed to allow booting to one of two Windows98 configurations (/dev/hda1 or /dev/hda2 respectively).

During RedHat''s text based install I elected to install /boot on the existing Linux partition /dev/hda3, swap of 124MB on /dev/sda1 and / on /dev/sda5.  LILO was installed to the root partition.  The install proceeded without difficulty.  However, the system was not able to boot from except from floppy.

Upon subsequent inspection /etc/lilo.conf was written to specify:

boot = /dev/sda

rather than the correct device:

boot = /dev/hda3

Altering the boot line as indicated immediately above (manually) resolved the problem.

Ken Brown
kbrown@trentu.ca
705.748.1121 x1540
 
 
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