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Re: Unable to make Linux bootable from HD or make boot floppy

Mark Fickett wrote:


I didn't notice; isn't it the linux ext2 that's 2x RAM? Currently I have it partitioned:
hda1: 379.98MB Primary Linux Swap, bootable
hda2: 48.10MB Primary Linux ext2, END of disk
Also for reference, I have only 899 cylinders, so the >1023 cylinders thing with LILO can't be the problem.
Okay, here's a definite problem. You want your swap partition to be 49MB. It's not critical that it's at the end of the disk, but that's where I'd put it. The larger portion will be for your system. It needs to be ext2 and on hda1 and bootable. Here's how you might want to partition it:
/dev/hda1 ext2 / 379.98MB /dev/hda2 swap swap 48.10MB 




I did open the case and check to see what the CD-ROM drive's plugged into; see above.
It is indeed plugged into the sound card, but since you've gotten it working, it's now a non-issue. 



The CD I'm using is definitely burned, but at the moment that doesn't seem to be an issue any more.


Yes, correct; it's now a non-issue.



What's the problem again?


The problem at the moment is that I can neither make the hard drive bootable, nor can I make a boot floppy.



Does the system boot off the installation CD?


The system at the moment is booting off of the rescue floppy, and then I laod the root floppy. Since I've already loaded drivers from floppies and installed the base sysetm (several times) from CD, I now just mount pre-initialized partitions so I don't have to redo that.



Does the install work fine until you try to make the hard drive bootable?


The installation does work fine until I get to making the hard drive bootable or making a floppy.



Do you get any error messages at that time?


I get LILO failure error messages when I try to make the HD bootable, saying "LILO wasn't able to install ... the most common reason why LILO fails is trying to boot a kernel that resides at a location on the disk higher than the 1023rd cylinder" ... etc. When I try to make a boot floppy, it seems to write the information to the floppy in a black-with-white-text screen, and then comes back to the dbootstrap screen, gives me a "making a filesystem on the floppy..." message, and then gives me an error: "Creation of the boot floppy failed. Please make sure that the floppy was not write-proteced, and that you put it in the first floppy drive. Try another floppy if the problem persists."

My current partition sceme is
hda1: 379.98MB Primary Linux Swap, bootable
hda2: 48.10MB Primary Linux ext2, at the end of the disk
I think that after you fix your partitioning scheme as mentioned above, your problem will go away. 

Kent



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