[ILUG] Before I install Linux?

[John P. Looney]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 04:31:40PM +0100, John Madden mentioned:
> I believe so yes. I think the whole /boot having to be on a certain
> section of the hard-drive is from days of old. I think lilo can handle
> it no matter where the /boot section is, and I'm pretty sure grub can
> aswell. I could be wrong though, it's been a while since I installed
> linux.

 It's a BIOS limitation. Until you have proper IDE drivers loaded, you
can't load anything after 8GB, unless your BIOS understands LBA, and is
set to use LBA, and lilo was configured as "LINEAR".

 From the lilo README:

    The cylinder limit is a very common problem with IDE disks. There, the
    number of cylinders may already exceed 1024 if the drive has a
    capacity of more than 504 MB. Many SCSI driver BIOSes present the disk
    geometry in a way that makes the limit occur near 1 GB. Modern disk
    controllers may even push the limit up to about 8 GB. All cylinders
    beyond the 1024th are inaccessible for the BIOS. LILO detects this
    problem and aborts the installation (unless the LINEAR option is used,
    see section "Global options").

 Unless you can put the /boot partition under the 8GB limitation (it only
needs to be 20MB or so), I'd advise reading the lilo documentation.

John