Re: disaster with LILO, Debian Linux, Windows, and booting
On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 05:29:46PM -0500, Spongebob wrote:
> Why is /dev/hda4 a bad choice for root? I can't use /dev/hda1 because of
> windows is there.
/dev/hda1 is at the start of the disk, /dev/hda4 is at the end of the
disk.
> No, that didn't work. GRUB gives me
> Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS
>
> So what does this mean?
Hard drives are organized into a set of concentric 'tracks' called
cylinders. GRUB can't boot the kernel you requested because that
file is physically located on the disk beginning in a cylinder which
the BIOS isn't able to boot the system from. Many BIOSes are only
able to boot the system off of the first 1024 cylinders; anything
further out than that is not bootable.
> I don't understand who's responsible here. Is it in the compilation process?
Nope. It's an artifact of where the kernel file is located on the
hard disk. If there's any way you can move it onto an earlier
partition, that should fix it. You mentioned having been running
Linux off that drive for a while without problems, you could also try
making copies of the kernel in hopes that one of them will be placed
in the bootable region of the disk, but that's just going to be a
matter of luck.
--
The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the
White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that
we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened.
- Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)
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