Re: LS-120 grub boot with 1.44MB but not 120MB floppy: "Geom Error"

[Mike McGuire <mjm19@po.cwru.edu>]

Yo.

I've got one of these fun little things too. One of these days I'll get 
grub up and running, maybe, but at present I'm sticking with lilo. I've 
got a LS-120 boot disk to run lilo, but it needed some extra parameter. 
I had to add the following to lilo.conf:

    disk=/dev/hdb
        bios=0x00

I don't use grub much yet, so I don't know if there's a corresponding 
option for it, so here's the relevant section from man lilo.conf so 
you have an idea what to look for:

    disk=<device-name>
        Defines  non-standard  parameters  for  the specified disk.  See 
        section "Disk geometry" of user.tex for details.  Especially 
        useful is the `bios=' parameter.  The BIOS numbers your disks 
        0x80, 0x81, etc.  and it  is  impossible  to decide which Linux 
        disk corresponds to which BIOS disk (since this depends on the 
        BIOS setup, and on the type of BIOS), so if you have an unusual 
        setup you need to state  the  correspondence between Linux disks 
        and BIOS disks.  For example,

            disk=/dev/sda
                bios=0x80
            disk=/dev/hda
                bios=0x81

        would  say  that your SCSI disk is the first BIOS disk, and your 
        (primary master) IDE disk is the second BIOS disk.

I'm guessing the bios=0x00 tells lilo to use whatever disk the BIOS 
thinks is the floppy drive. But if that's what setting (fd0) was 
supposed to do you might be stuck. Hope you're just missing something.

HTH,
Mike McGuire