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LILO can't find the boot kernels when booting from the harddrive and stops at LI (or another incomplete part of the word LILO, see also LILO fails: Error-messages and their interpretation (kgw_lilo_errmsg.html)). This happens even though you have respected the 1024 cylinder limit (Linux above 1024 cylinders and LILO(1024_Zylinder.html)))
This happens in particular, if you have installed another operating system in the beginning of your harddrive (e.g. Windows NT).
One possible cause : LILO was installed with the option "linear" enabled.
Deactivate the option "linear" in /etc/lilo.conf
by erasing it
or by putting a comment sign in front of that line :
# linearReinstall lilo: as root, invoke the command
# /sbin/lilo
Effect of the "linear" option :
All references (pointers) to harddrive sectors of /boot/boot.b, /boot/map
, kernel, etc.
are stored in the LILO bootsector and in /boot/map
as logical sector adresses
instead of physical (cylinder-head-sector) adresses.
At boot time the LILO boot sector determines the geometry of the harddrive by calling a BIOS function. It then converts the logical sector adresses back to physical adresses. The real access to the harddrive(s) is done using the physical sector adresses.
Purpose : The "linear" option is useful when the BIOS "sees" a particular harddrive with a geometry different from the one Linux uses. The logical sector adresses remain correct independent of the geometry of the harddrive.
This is a rare case, so the "linear" option isn't really necessary most of the time. It is nevertheless activated by default in all cases when LILO was installed with YaST (in S.u.S.E. Linux until version 5.2).
Update: the following limitation concerns older LILO versions prior to v21 only (SuSE Linux 6.0 and older). LILO v21 and newer calculates the address conversion in another way which avoids 16-bit overflows.
Difficulty : When using the "linear" option another limitation (so far undocumented) must be taken into account (besides the 1024 cylinder limitation). It comes into effect in particular for modern big harddrives : "linear" only works
with 16 sectors/track below 512 MB with 32 sectors/track below 1 GB with 63 sectors/track below ~2 GBThis limitation is more restrictive than the 1024 cylinder limitation when there are more than 64 heads. Nowadays, geometries with 128 or 255 heads are very common.
The reason : One of the auxiliary results during the conversion into physical adresses at boot time is the track of the particular sector and this conversion is done with 16 bit arithmetics. Thus track must be < 65536 .
See also:
Keywords: BOOT, BOOT PROBLEMS, LILO, LINEAR, 1024, CYLINDER, INSTALLATION
Categories:
LILO
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