[RULE] HDD Failure

[Martin Stricker]

> On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, david jamison wrote:

> > I took the opportuninty to upgrade the hard disk on my RULE box from
> > 2Gb to 10Gb and all seemed well disc recognised by autodetect in BIOS
> > and the install went OK absolutely no strange happenings or errors.
> >
> > When I do the final reboot the box hangs completely when usinging LILO
> > I get the capital letter L of LILO and a flashing cursor and nothing
> > else.

These types of errors are documented within the LILO documentation (which I
sadly don't have handy). Depending on how much letter of "LILO:" appear ist
means different things.

This may be connected to the disk size. If your /boot directory resides on a
partition which goes beyond the 8GB border, especially old BIOSes may
experience problems in reaching the kernel and stuff to boot up. LILO needs
the BIOS to boot the kernel, while GRUB does this on its own and thus is
independent from BIOS restrictions, just like the Linux kernel.

Workarounds: Either create a small /boot partition (100 MB should be more
than enough) at the beginning of the harddisk (but swap should be always the
first partition because access is the fastest there), or try the lba32
option in /etc/lilo.conf (sorry, for details please refer to LILO's
documentation). For this, boot from the first Red Hat Linux CD, choose
rescue mode, wait until your system is recognized (if it's not you have a
real harddisk problem), type `chroot /mnt/sysimage`, change /etc/lilo.conf,
run `lilo -v -v` and reboot. If that doesn't help, your BIOS doesn't support
LBA32. In that case, either try updating the BIOS or use GRUB instead of
LILO.

Best regards,
Martin Stricker

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