[clug] LILO weirdness: followup

Gary Woodman antigramp at yahoo.com.au
Tue Dec 28 13:28:24 GMT 2004


--- Francis Whittle <fudje at phreaker.net> wrote:

> Fedora booted you into a grub *prompt*?  Didn't set you up with a
> pretty menu?

Indeed.

> Is it possible to skip installation steps with Anaconda?  (I can't
> remember) ... If so, did you?

Nope. Install didn't stop after the 'this is your last chance to stick
with Debian' prompt.

> > Fatal: stat /dev/hda: No such file or directory
> 
> Intriguing.

Read on...
 
> > disk=/dev/hda bios=0x80
> > disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x81
> 
> # I don't remember seeing the above lines before.  You might consider
> commenting them out and see if that fixes anything.  I'm pretty sure
> you don't need them for most setups anyway.

Did that before posting; no change, because...

> >         append="rw acpi=on "
> 
> # Booting straight to read-write mode are we?  Tsk, tsk.

Take it up with the Xandros installer :-)
 
> grub> root (hd0,0)
> grub> kernel /vmlinux-2.6.9-1.667 root=/dev/hda5
> grub> initrd /initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
> grub> boot

Nice, helpful, didn't work. I received Error 18, 'selected cylinder
exceeds max supported by the BIOS'. Huh?

Prompted by this, I decided to check the BIOS. Lo and behold, the entry
for hda had it with 528 megs! How did that happen? LILO clearly doesn't
care. GRUB is more clever than the BIOS. Off to the BIOS HDD
recognition; the BIOS wanted it to be LARGE, so on a whim I changed it
to LBA and restarted. Voila! Fedora boots. Xandros is still broken (04
04 04...), but I don't care, now I have a new toy :-)

Let that be a lesson for us young players: the BIOS can be wrong;
sometimes that matters.
 
> One advantage of GRUB is that you don't have to reinstall it in
> the boot sector every time you change your menu slightly.

That is true. I immediately went off to update FC3, 82 new packages,
including a kernel. Rebooted with no dramas. So we're away!

My thanks to Francis for valuable suggestions.

Gary


		
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