LILO

[Clint Thayer]

Well I got Red hat 7.1 installed and one of the issues I knew I had little
knowledge of was partitioning the drive up.  I was hoping that the auto
partition feature would rescue me from the pain of having to dive into that
subject, but alas...

I guess with a 3 gig drive it did not have enough space to perform the auto
partition feature (so the installer tells me) and I was left with my worse
fears and a page and a half in the Install book of Red Hat 6.2

So here is the problem...  turn the machine on after the install and it goes
through the normal memory check and then goes to look for an OS on the C
drive.  Give it about 5 seconds and I see a little "L" at the bottom of the
screen.  It just sits there at that point and does nothing.

After a few digs on the web I think I know what is happening, or at least
have a mild understanding of the area of my problem...  I think the LILO is
getting to the first stage of the boot sequence (in the Master Boot Record)
and fails to find the second stage within the /boot partition.

So my first question is...  When I created the /boot, swap and /root
partitions during the install, I was not certain what order I created them
in...  does this matter?  Should the /boot be the first partition, and if
it's not does the LILO have troubles finding it?

If partition position does matter, is there a way to move the partitions
around once I'm running from a floppy boot?

Here are the partitions I created in no specific order:
/boot - 16MB - Linux Native
swap - 16MB - swap
/root - 1.8 G - Linux Native (can grow)

More useless info:

I can boot off of the floppy...  I can login via graphic mood and play
around in KDE...  I have what appears (minus the booting issue) a working
system.  During my dig on the net I come the following article on Red-Hat's
support site...

http://www.redhat.com/support/alex/161.html

I did the "/sbin/lilo -v -v" command during one of the floppy boot ups and
the only thing that looked non-normal was a reference to not finding
"/dev/hda" (I'm not 100% sure that was the directory...  my memory is not
fantastic).  I check out the readme they reference in the article, but at
this stage on understanding, the readme has WAY to much info.

Well I guess that's it...  any help would be greatly enjoyed.
-bootless in Lansing


-Clint Thayer
Email: clint@thayernet.com
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