hi people.
yesterday (satuday) I've went to some guy who wants to get into linux to
install RedHat on his system (I've used the PF1 RH6 cd I got at the
instaparty - I decided I like it - except for some packages that are
missing) and the darnest thing happened :
He has this really generic system (for that time period when he bought it
;-> ) a P133 with 32MB on a Rhino board, vibra16 non-PnP, 3.2Gb HDD and
some kind of no-name modem. we had cut the Disk (WD ? I don't remember -
should have written it down) which had Win98 on FAT32, with FIPS, to
have two partitions - a 2 giga something with Win98, and the rest for
Linux. I then used the RH "disk druid" to make a swap space and native
ext2 for linux (the same way I always do it) and then install the system.
the installation was a brease, and everything went fine (except for some
problems with the RH6 installed Font Server {xfs} - did anyone had
problems with it ? I'll later check what's happening there and report
back..) and I installed LILO in the MBR. when all was done I tried to boot
back to dos and what happened, is that LILO starts, I type dos, it says :
loading dos..
and then jumps back to the LILO prompt ! another thing to mention - I've
tried to mount the dos partition from linux (mount /dev/hda1 dos -t vfat)
and it gave it's generic error message of :
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1,
or too many mounted file systems
I didn't presue that. I've then used a win rescue disk to write the dos
system back where it belongs (which overwrites the MBR too), and windows
went up w/o problems (that is - not any new ones :-> ). we then booted
back to linux (using the RH6 cd - we skipped the installation suggestion
for a rescue disk... silly me) and run lilo. it did it again.
well, then we've given up on lilo and tried system commander. SC didn't
want to run - it said that there was an error in the partition table - the
table said the the swap space ends on cylinder 781, but SC insisted that
there are only 780 cylinders on the drive. the BIOS was set to autodetect
the drive upon boot (that's the way it was set up when I got there and I
dont want to change things that work), so maybe it was this problem. I've
change the CMOS settings to have the disk "fixed" in the BIOS (I've used
the CMOS autodetect hdds option) and the table in CMOS listed the HDD as
having 782 cylinders (that is - the last cylinder is 781) but SC still
insisted that is wrong.
then I've just givem up. we boot Linux by using loadlin.
any idea what went wrong here ?
oh -here's what lilo.conf looked like :
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
default=dos
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hda5
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label=dos
table=/dev/hda
Oded.
