Linux on a big drive

[GMorris]

Hi, all,

I'm new to the forum, and have a strange problem that might have a quick answer.
I have installed Linux before, and gotten it to work with Red Hat and one other (forget the name, but I didn't like it) so I'm not a total newbie or anything like that. I have a bunch of free space (~8G) at the END of my second 30G drive. Linux will install fine, and can be booted from the floppy, but I have Partition Magic and would rather not even use LILO if I can get away with it. After quite a bit of experimentation, it looks like Linux just cannot do without it unless you use the boot floppy (takes FOREVER!) with LILO on it. I went back through the install for the xth time, and asked it to put LILO on the root partition, and NOT the MBR. Well, it didn't like that, and will not let me put it there. I guess what I'm after is, is there a limitation on where LILO has to physically reside in order to work properly? I want to set this up so that there is an option in Boot Magic to load Linux from the end of my drive. Can anyone shed some light on this? If more info is needed I'll supply anything I know!

Thanks in advance,

Gary

[Ardith]

I think your problem is the 1024 cylinder limit. That might have been fixed in a later version of LILO, or you could try another boot manager like GRUB.

Ardith

[furrycat]

Use the single line "lba32" in lilo.conf and delete "linear" if it's there.

Should work now.

(If you're using a recent lilo, of course.)

[GMorris]

Well, the problem comes up during the installation of Red Hat, where it asks where you want to put LILO, and the only options are in the MBR or on the physical partition where root resides. When I pick the partition, it gives an error and starts up a loop that continues until I pick "skip this step" or something. I believe the 1024+ limitation is probably it, and more than likely I'll have to either move some partitions around, boot from the floppy everytime or just forget about having Linux on this drive at all. I WILL NOT put it on the MBR as this will wipe out Boot Magic, which lets me pick between WinME and NT4 already. Any other ideas?

[furrycat]

Just put it on the MBR. LILO will let you add a/some Windows partition(s) to the boot menu, and from there you can use boot.ini. I believe Red Hat is sufficiently far advanced nowadays to offer to do this for you.

Warnings about LILO mashing your MBR are like those saying incorrect XFree86 modelines will blow up your monitor. They maybe used to be true long ago for certain people in some circumstances but the chances of such things happening on modern kit are practically zero.

[furrycat]

Somebody shoot me in the head.

The correct answer is to skip the step and write out the lilo.conf file yourself. That means opening up the shell on console 2 (or wherever you can get a console on the Red Hat install) and hopping on over to the new etc directory. Somebody help me out - where does Red Hat mount your root drive during install? Is it /mnt?

Assuming it is /mnt you'd do this:

cd /mnt/etc
cat > lilo.conf
lba32
boot = /dev/hdaX
image = /vmlinuz
label = linux
rood = /dev/hdaX
read-only
^D

Where hdaX is your new partition. I'm assuming Red Hat installs the kernel as /vmlinuz. It might be in /boot or somewhere. I cannot help you with this.

<Edit>Oops, forgot to mention that ^D means control-D</edit>

Now you can run lilo with "chroot /mnt /sbin/lilo"

As you can see, just using the MBR is easier but I felt bad for not answering the question.

[This message has been edited by furrycat (edited 07-22-2001).]

[GMorris]

Thanks for the info. I'll give it a try, and post the results good or bad.

[loungebear]

Sorry I'm warning that I tend to babble. But this might be really usefull....

Knowing what hardware you're using would be usefull. I dual boot linux all the time. Do you have two drives??? What model motherboard are you using? I have a 1 year old asus motherboard and a few drives using the latest releases of win98 and Redhat linux. The key is to be able to select the master or slave drive as the boot device in the bios. For the "newbie type". Install redhat on the master drive and install lilo on the mbr. You can configure lilo to give the option to boot other partitions and drives at startup. Then reboot and see if you can boot from your newly installed linux partition. If you can good. If not, using the boot floppy you should have made. you'll want to boot up the system, edit /etc/lilo.conf so it reads that it is booting from /dev/hda or /dev/sda (if your running scsi drives), not /dev/hda1 or 2,3 etc as they are partitions, not the mbr. Then logged in as root type "lilo -v", the v is for verbose output so you can see what lilo does. This will install your newly edited lilo.conf file and write it to the mbr. If you need to remove it you can issue "lilo -u". Type "man lilo" and read the man page. You can see all the options. Otherwise you can boot from a dos boot disk and type "fdisk /mbr" and that will nuke the mbr, so you can install and boot from windows on that drive if you have to. If booting linux from you hard drive is working then reboot and change your bios boot order to the second hard drive. Save it and reboot. Then install windows on your second drive and test booting the second "windows" drive. If you want to multiboot with more than one windows os... then install boot magic "since you own it already" on the windows hard drive and install additional windows versions on partitions from that drive. Then switch the bios back to boot from the linux drive. This will let lilo choose to boot from linux or from boot magic. I know that's wierd but it works great for me and it's easy to do. If you have pretty recent hardware and RedHat 7.1 with 2 drives it's really pretty easy. I've tested this with win98 and win2k Here is a sample config file:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
message=/boot/message
default=linux

image=/boot/bzImage
label=new
read-only
root=/dev/hda1

image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux
# initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.16-22.img
read-only
root=/dev/hda1
#This section is for booting windows
#on drive 2
other=/dev/hdb
label=winderz
map-drive=0x80
to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80

This will give you the option to choose os's at startup, reboot and see.

Notice that linux is booting from /dev/hda, "that's the mbr".
Also notice the section called other the map-drive and to commands. They are needed to trick the bios so that it presents drive 2 as drive 1. This is needed because windows thinks it needs to boot from the first partition of the primary drive. Also... by installing the os's on different drives if you mess either one of them up you can just select the other as the boot device in your pc's bios. So it's pretty painless to go this route as your experimenting. If you know how to use the mount command, you can make a nice big fat 32 partition and use it for storage to save your windows files and your linux files as linux can mount fat 32 partitions. But it cannot be ntfs. Linux does not play nice with windows nt partitions if you mount them. But fat 32 works just great. You can do this with older redhat versions but there are lots of improvements in RedHat 7.1 that make xwindows nicer and the whole experience much easier, for windows users. Last thought... If you have problems with your mouse try running "mouseconfig" at the console as root and selecting a generic mouse that matches the button count on yours.

Done Babbling

[furrycat]

Paragraphs!