[4984] in RedHat Linux List
Re: IDE hard drive problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rick Forrester)
Mon Nov 18 13:08:53 1996
To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Cc: rickf@glacier.jpl.nasa.gov
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 18 Nov 1996 12:45:34 EST."
<199611181745.MAA10012@jagnew.cstone.net>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 1996 10:05:37 -0800
From: Rick Forrester <rickf@glacier.jpl.nasa.gov>
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
> > Many BIOS's out there do not support booting from any drive except the
> > first two; i.e. hda & hdb or sda & sdb. You can use > 2 drives; just
> > can't boot from them. I've got (due to educational needs of a
> > project) 4 Linux & 1 Win95 installations right now. I have two boot
> > partitions on sda and 3 on sdb, with the rest of the partitions
> > distributed on other drives. There are other advantages to
> > distributing your partitions, also, especially with scsi drives.
>
> I do understand that booting problem, but I don't think that is
> a factor here.. it does successfully boot off the floppy,
> then mounts / at /dev/hdc2, and everything works fine.
>
The boot floppy is one of the 3 drives essentially all PC BIOS's
support booting from. Booting from a floppy drive sidesteps the
LILO/BIOS problem; you'r _NOT_ then trying to boot from /dev/hdc -
you're booting from /dev/fd0.
> It's not until I try to run lilo again to change the information
> on that floppy that I see the error...
>
> ide: Warning BIOS drive 0x82 may not be accessible
> .... /dev/hdc may have an invalid entry... run .../scripts/
> MAKEDEV.ide to correct the problem.
LILO is telling you that it probably won't be able to access the drive.
There _IS_ a BIOS limitation here, and in your case MAKEDEV.ide is not
the answer.
>
> I ran MAKEDEV.ide, and it didn't help anything.
>
> Thanks for the info.. if you know anything else, it's
> greatly appreciated..
>
> Clint
>
Clint, if you have a _small_ partition (as small as 2-3Mb available on
/dev/hda or /dev/hdb, you can install that as /boot, copy your kernel
there, and reconfigure LILO to look there to find your boot kernel.
That will stop the problems.
The other alternative I'd suggest you consider is loadln, if you're
running a DOS/Windows partition at all. That approach, too, should
avoid the boot problem.
Best-
Rickf
--
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| Rick Forrister | <rickf@glacier.jpl.nasa.gov |
| Win 95: Where do you want to go today? |
| Linux: What do you want tomorrow? |
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