Re: disk partitions (part 3) ... :D
At 11:35 03.03.98 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi Helmut;
>
>I am not really much of an expert in this sort of problem but would like
>to see if I can help you to have a little better understanding of what
>is going on with your system (as best as I understand anyway)...
>
>The ROM portion of DOS loads and executes the mbr, including accessing
>the disk drive for the mbr code. Thus for your system to boot, it is
>necessary for the ROM code to be able to find the files needed by lilo
>(the files in /boot).
>
>The was 'created' as a 'normal' disk and not a 'lba' disk. The ROM code
>then has to use the 'normal' mode to find the files needed by lilo. If
>you change the mode to 'lba' then when the ROM code interprets the disk
>structure information to produce the block numbers that should be used
>by the drive to seek to the requested files, the resulting numbers are
>NOT the blocks where the files are actually located.
>
>As far as I know the DOS portition of this problem IS not solvable by
>any practical method other than reformating the disk under DOS with the
>mode set to LBA. It is actually possible to hand edit the disk
>structure information used by the DOS based ROM code and I am told that
>there are people that have done this but it is anything but a trivial
>task!
>
>IF you do not need to have DOS access to this drive (that would include
>Win95 and OS2) you MIGHT be able to do a 'work around'. First I don't
>KNOW that this will work and can't quite tell from your posting if you
>already have indication that it will not...
>
>IF the ROM code can load and execute the mbr with the CMOS mode set to
>LBA then I think that this will work otherwise it is just a waste of
>your time and effort. My suggestion is:
>
>Set the CMOS to LBA for the drive (this BTW is something that I CAN NOT
>do on my own system -- if a drive on my system was formatted in normal
>mode then a change to LBA in the CMOS is automatically changed back).
>
>Boot your system using a Linux boot floppy (rescue/installation) if you
>don't have something else.
>
>Run lilo (note that if you boot Linux such that your hard disk is NOT
>the root filesystem (such as is the case with using the
>rescue/installation disk) then it is necessary to tell lilo where the
>normal root partition is currently mounted (see the lilo HOWTO or man
>page) with something like "lilo -r /target" (assuming of course that you
>mounted your normal hard disk Linux root filesystem on the rescue disk's
>ram filesystem on the directory named 'target').
>
>Now AGAIN, I have no idea whether this will work or not. For this to
>work it is necessary that 1) the ROM code actually will access the disk
>when there is a mode mismatch and 2) that lilo _uses_ that code to
>determine what the location of the files that are needed during boot
>WILL be.
>
>I was just going to send this to you privately but I believe that it is
>better to subject this to critical review of those that know the lilo
>code as well as the details of exactly how the disk information is used
>and interpreted by the ROM code.
>
>
>--
>best,
>-bill
THANKS, Bill !
My vendor just gave me an updated BIOS version for the motherboard I'm usig
(PA2000). Is it a good idea to rewrite the Eprom and then try to boot with
the new BIOS ? Or is this rather dangerous and my old BIOS should work
anyway ?
Helmut
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