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LILO Stopping at LI --- LBA and "linear", or NOT

From Ryan Ayers on Sun, 26 Mar 2000

Mr. Dennis,

I was reading through the some past articles you wrote. Some one keeps asking about the LI problem. Well, it has been my experience that sometimes I can cure it by detecting the hard drive in the bios as LBA instead of normal or large. As soon as I change it back to normal, then it starts the LI thing again.

Have you heard of this too?

Ryan Ayers

Yes. I've suggested it many times. If you set the CMOS/BIOS to "LBA" (linear block addressing) you generally should add the corresponding "linear" directive your your /etc/lilo.conf (and run the /sbin/lilo command to process those directives into a boot block and a set of boot maps, of course).

It's not just "someone" --- it's alot of someones. Questions about LILO are some of the most common that there are in Linux. This is because LILO is unlike anything from the MS-Windows and MS-DOS world, and it is unlike anything on traditional UNIX workstations. It is unique to Linux and basically necessary given that Linux provides such flexibility in where you put its kernel and what sorts of filesystems you're allowed to use for your root mount.

I'll copy this one to the column --- just as an extra tip for those who don't read through enough of my answers.

Copyright © 2000, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 52 April 2000

HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Tuxtops, Inc., http://www.tuxtops.com/

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