On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 11:51:52AM -0800, Daniel Miller wrote: > Hullo the group! > > I've a got machine that I've been fighting with to make a usable > router. Debian Woody installed just dandy - but I cannot get it to boot > using either LILO or GRUB - I get errors going to stage 1.5 from GRUB > and LILO usually hangs up with L0 L0 L0, etc. > > I'm assuming this is a hard drive / bios problem - I've used cfdisk to > eliminate all partitions, started from scratch, and same mproblem. >
Yeah - just been through a very similar battle with an Epox motherboard EP-8RDA and a Samsung 80G and a Maxtor 60G drives. I won't bore you with all the hassles, but in my case (after hours of digging), I discovered that the BIOS has a setting for how the hdds are addressed. I don't pretend to understand all the details, but the BIOS was defaulting (on an AUTO setting) to CHS, whereas on larger disks, LBA (or perhaps large?) are appropriate. I also found that Grub wouldn't start because of the discrepancy between the BIOSes view of the drives and Grub's own, even when looking at a boot floppy. Once I'd set the BIOS to use LBA addressing, I got Grub to boot from a floppy, and then installed Grub on the Samsung drive. I've not tried Lilo, but I guess it would probably work as well, as it has LBA support. And finally, once I'd changed the addressing, (c)fdisk was able to correctly write *and then read* the partition table from the Samsung drive, whereas it had always failed on read, beforehand. I could boot using the debian install disk in rescue mode during all of this, which was more than a little confusing. The final clue for me was a kernel message (from dmesg) which said something along the lines of 'ignoring BIOS chs settings'. No idea if that'll help. Have fun. -- Mark Kent -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
