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dodgethis
05-21-2003, 03:29 PM
I've really been pulling my hair out at this one, so if you can help I'd be very greateful. Right brace yourself ...
On trying to install Slackware 8.1, I can get all the way through the install routine no problems. My problem comes when I try and boot the new system. I'm pretty sure I've configured LILO correctly through the installation routine (and afterwards manually too). The reason I'm confident about this is that I've had various Unices working on different PCs before.

Here's what happens. LILO comes up and asks me whether I want to boot to Microsoft Windows or Linux. Booting into Windows works fine, however Linux does not.

When I choose Linux the kernel appears to load and gets as far as detecting my on board IDE controller and drives, but falls down on detecting my PCI IDE controller.

The real thing that makes me scratch my head is that. I've tried various different kernels, I've tried mucking about with the map file and nothing gets me any further. It does work however, when I boot my H/D using LILO and the bare.i kernel off of the install CD.

I have tried copying the bare.i kernel to my /boot dir but still this does not work.

If I am using the same kernel but just from a different place why does this not work???

My H/D has several partitions hda1 is 98 hda5 (I think) is XP and hda7 (for definite) is Linux root. hda7 does lie beyond cylinder 1024, but I have tried both lba32 and linear.

I don't think the problem's with LILO because LILO appears to load the kernel fine.

I'm not a complete novice, so please no comments about "have you checked your paths" etc. But I will welcome any suggestions. This has me completely stumped.

Ooh, one last thing, on this particular PC the only Distro I've actually had working in that partition is Gentoo(+GRUB). I've tried a good few others (including ones which use GRUB) but ONLY Gentoo has worked without stopping at the same point.

WHY DOES THE KERNEL WORK OFF THE CD MY BUT NOT MY HD??????????

jetblackz
05-24-2003, 12:52 AM
"It does work however, when I boot my H/D using LILO and the bare.i kernel off of the install CD.

I have tried copying the bare.i kernel to my /boot dir but still this does not work. " doesn't make sense to me. If you boot lilo then the kernel must be on hd. Or you mean to say booting the CD?

My previous PC was set up as

98, 2k on ntfs, linux, linux, swap and my_doc

It booted to a boot program on mbr, let me choose between all OSes. It doesn't overwrite NT BOOTLOADER. The latter resided on the root of 98 drive. So booting either Win must go through NTBOOTLOADER.

My PC was simple on mobo, no add-on IDE controllers.

What's your setup? How many add-on IDE card connected to how many drives? If there's any, you must set BIOS up to boot to this IDE card. Same for RAID. Except for onboard RAID.

1024 cylinder limit is an stone-age issue. Unless of course your PC is stone-age.

dodgethis
05-24-2003, 08:18 AM
"It does work however, when I boot my H/D using LILO and the bare.i kernel off of the install CD. "

What I mean by this was using LILO off the install CD I would specify the kernel image "bare.i". This instructs LILO to use the image off of the CD. Then passing the kernel the parameters "root=/dev/hda7 noinitrd ro" which instructs the CD kernel to use the H/D partition as root. So in effect I am booting the OS kernel from CD and using all the OS system files/commands from the H/D.

Tireseas
05-24-2003, 07:34 PM
Hello

I am probably missing something in your description of your difficulty, so my apologies if i am stating the obvious here ... :(

AFAIK, the LILO boot loader is installed onto the / partition, rather than the /boot partition as in other distro's. If I remember correctly, RH and Mdk tend to create (or expect) a primary partition at /dev/hda1 for the bootloader. I tried that with Slack once and all I got was a kernel panic!!!
On my current laptop system - also Slack 8.1 BTW - even though I opted for the ''simple'' option of automatically installing the Lilo bootloader, I still have to boot up with a boot-disk, and I'm also running a single boot machine.
Which brings me to the point of this post: is it a feature of the Slack 8.1 distro that it doesn't boot without a disk or CD-ROM?
:confused: