Re: disaster with LILO, Debian Linux, Windows, and booting

[Spongebob <NadaSpam@adelphia.net>]

> 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.

Ah, the little light-bulb above my head is beginning to glow. Maybe it's 
not gremlins in the computer after all. Am I maybe hitting the 32 GB 
barrier I hear mentioned sometimes?

/dev/hda1 = 20 GB, fat32
/dev/hda3 = 2 GB, swap
/dev/hda4 = 52 GB, ext2
/dev/hda5 = 60 GB, fat32
/dev/hda6 = 20 GB, fat32

hda4 is nearly 2/3 full. Last time I compiled a kernel it was probably only 
about 20% full.