Re: Lilo on dell 7500 - disk geom

[Greg Woods <gswoods@dimensional.com>]

Christian DeKonink wrote:
> My swap part starts at 566 and ends at 601.
> My linux partition starts at cylinder 602 and ends at 1299.
> I guess that the boot block was installed at some point beyond the
> 1024th cylinder.
> 
> Is that what's happening?

Probably the boot block isn't the problem. It's always at the very
beginning of the partition.
However, the kernel you are loading also must be in front of cylinder
1024. I would suspect that if your partition goes beyond 1024, all or
part of the kernel file you are trying to load is beyond 1024. That
could cause the "LI" hang. Unfortunately, if you have an active file
system, and part of it goes beyond 1024, there is no way to guarantee
that the kernel file you create will be within the limit. What you might
do is create two partitions for Linux, one for root and one for /usr,
and make sure that the root one stays below 1024. Then if you put your
kernels on that partition, you can probably avoid this problem. The
whole operating system doesn't have to be below 1024, just the kernel
you are loading at boot time.

--Greg