Booting beyond 1024 Cylinders

[psyklops]

Is there anyway I can tell if my motherboard will boot beyond 1024 cylinder mark? Ill be using the lilo from RHv7.

[The Whizzard]

The 1024th cylinder problem only was a limitation of LILO not the BIOS.

I haven't used RedHat since 6.2 so I'm not certain but believe the LILO in RH7 supports booting past the 1024th cylinder.

On previous versions of LILO making a 16 MB /boot partition below the 1024th cylinder will boot linux.

[X_console]

You should no longer have this limitation with the new versions of LILO, which should be included in your version of RedHat.

[error27]

i think windows still has problems with it though...

it seems like only a year ago that linux had those probs also.

[jdctx]

I think your right error5
mbr for windows had to be within the first 1000 cylinders or so. If the idea is to put a /boot partition past the 1000 cylinders. I'd say yes.
I have a machine set as
"/"(250mb),"/boot(100mb)","swap"(200mb),"/usr(3gig)","/home"(1.6gi) all in that order

[Silent Bob]

Your BIOS has to support booting beyond the 1024th cylinder (according to LILO docs).

I have a dual boot RH7.1/Win2k with my boot partition waaaay past the 1024th cylinder without any problems

[psyklops]

So when I go into BIOS what do I need to look for to see if it will boot past 1024 cylinders?

[bluesky]

If you have windows 9x, you can't put the /boot partition over the 1024 cylinder limit. For win2k, there is no problem.

You can make one small partition of 16mb for /boot and put it in front of your window 9x system. This will work.

[Dark Ninja]

Ahhhhh...so that's why Mandrake doesn't offer the /boot partition anymore. They're assuming nobody will need that 16 meg /boot partition to boot their system. (Which...they won't with that version of Mandrake.) I was curious about that. Kewl.


Dark Ninja

[DMR]

Your BIOS must be capable of LBA (Logical Block Addressing) to be able to properly identify the geometry of large drives (>1024 cylinders). If the BIOS is limited to using int 13h disk access routines (which use the cylinder, head, sector method of reporting disk geometry), you will have the 1024 cylinder limitation. Modern BIOSes have supported LBA for some time, so it won't be a problem on a fairly new computer.

Lilo's 1024 cylinder limitation is fixed in versions 21-3 and greater (provided your BIOS is LBA capable, of course). Grub never suffered from this problem in any version.

[psyklops]

I may just install the 16 MB /Boot in front of my windows partition if all else fails. Will windows over look this and dual boot anyway? I heard it wont function if it doesn't have the first spot on the drive.

[johnmann]

Originally posted by PsyKlops:
<STRONG>Is there anyway I can tell if my motherboard will boot beyond 1024 cylinder mark? Ill be using the lilo from RHv7.</STRONG>
If your puter is only a couple years old your BIOS should support booting beyond 1024 cylinder.American Megatrends,Phoenix and Award all support that these days.Just not a factor anymore I believe.