RE: tlug: LILO Vs. 1024 cylinders

[Scott Stone <sstone@example.com>]

On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, J. Sean Bennett wrote:

> >
> > Ain't no drag - papa's got a brand new disk!
> >
> ...papa's keepin' late hours on a school night too... ;-)
> 
> > When I
> > ran fdisk on this drive to partition it, I was warned that the drive has
> > over 1024 cylinders (yeah, it has over 12,000!) and that this could be a
> > problem for LILO.  So what inquiring minds wanna know is:
> >
> > 1) Why is this a problem for LILO?
> 
> well, have just actually installed RH5.1 recently (been a FreeBSD'er all
> along in the office...), I've recently seen the same warnings;  here's what
> I could track down.
> 
> "...What exactly is the 1024th cylander?  That's where IDE ends and EIDE
> begins-- that's the 528M "mark" on your hard disk."    (quoted, spelling
> errors intact, from an FAQ I didn't keep the author of)
> 
> > 2) What should I do about it?
> 
> "...Start your Linux partition at around 520 M, so the entire kernel and
> other boot/loader files will completely reside below that cylander..."

You can also put the drive into LBA mode in the CMOS, which maps the whole
drive to <= 1024 cylinders, 63 sectors per track, and some ungodly number
of heads.  My cmoses only seem to enable this on the primary IDE, though,
which is weird.  Even if I tell them to enable it for /dev/hdc and
/dev/hdd, they don't seem to obey, but Linux doesn't care, unless you're
booting from it.  The FAQ above was probably written back in '94, or for
computers that were made earlier than that, when LBA wasn't around.  

Keep in mind, though, that the 1024 cyl limit is a LILO (and DOS)
limitation, not a Linux limitation.

> 
> Let me know how you make out, and if you find a way around this if need be.
> The first partition on my 8.4G is around 1G, and is already occupied,  so I
> haven't installed RH on that disk...yet.  Speaking of which, if anyone has
> any experience/tips on installing RH5.1 and WinNT on a disk already
> containing Win98 in the first Gig, I'm all ears.  I've Partition Magic, so
> moving things around isn't *too* much of a chore... if I have too.
> 

LBA.  Should be an option in your CMOS, if your computer will recognize an
8.4GB disk at all...

> ...time for my futon...
> 
> Sean.
> 
> --
> *********************************
> Sean Bennett
> 16-23 Daishin-cho,
> Morioka City, Iwate Prefecture,
> Japan   020-0135
> 
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--------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com, sstone@example.com>
               <sstone@example.com>
Head of TurboLinux Development/Systems Administrator
Pacific HiTech, Inc (USA) / Pacific HiTech, KK (Japan)
http://www.pht.com		http://armadillo.pht.co.jp
http://www.pht.co.jp	        http://www.turbolinux.com


---------------------------------------------------------------
Next Meeting: 10 October, 12:30 Tokyo Station Yaesu central gate
Featuring the IMASY Eng. Team on "IPv6 - The Next Generation IP"
Next Nomikai: 20 November, 19:30  Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
---------------------------------------------------------------
Sponsor: PHT, makers of TurboLinux http://www.pht.co.jp