This should be an easy one...

[Melinda Gates]

I just installed RH 7.1 on an old IBM 350 and it went pretty smoothly. But when I rebooted all I got was a single upper-case "L" at the top left corner of the screen and a blinking cursor.

What is that?

It boots to a floppy just fine, but when going to the HDD this what I get.

And thanks for all the help people!!

[cuzvinn]

When LILO ( LInux LOader) boots , It spells out the LILO. The printing of each letter accurs with the performing of some action. When only part of the word is spelled out, it indicates that LILO has failed at a certain spot.
When just an 'L' appears, LILO has started up but is not able to /boot/boot.b.

Post your lilo.conf file, located in /etc/lilo.conf.
Are you running any other OS's
on a seperate partition or hard drive?

[Melinda Gates]

Doh! Too late to post the file as I'm going through the install again. The explaination on the spelling out of LILO helps though. My current theory is that it's got something to do w/ the fact that I'm using a 20 Gb. EIDE HDD on an old, straight IDE machine. This would work under a M$ OS, but the OS would only "see" part of the drive. Maybe Linux is a little fussier. My plan is to go throught the text-bases install (I used the GUI last time and let it auto-partition the drive) and see if a different partitioning scheme might help. If not I'll try to dig up a drive w/ <
1024 cylanders. Sound reasonable?

[Melinda Gates]

Yup. That looks like it! When I installed using the text based Anaconda I got a warning that I was trying to put the Kernel above cylander 1024 and that I may have problems. I moved the "/" mountpoint to a different partition and I'm finishig up the install with my fingers crossed.

[DMR]

Newer versions of lilo don't have the 1024 cylinder limitation anymore, and Grub (another bootloader) never did.
;)

[Dark Ninja]

Um...actually...with that 'L' "thing"...well, here's what happened with me.

When I first got Slackware, I had that same problem. An L would be up at the top left corner of the screen for about 5 seconds and then disappear. However, it wasn't the problem I thought it was. Just hit space bar, or some other key, and the rest of the word finishes. (EX: I hit the space bar, and the word Lilo: would pop up as a prompt.)

From there, I could type "Linux" or "Windows" depending on what OS I wanted to boot into. Otherwise, I'd go straight into Windows.


Dark Ninja

[nopri]

hello,

Have you tried :

lilo -P fix ?

NOP