LI on boot

[Jason]

Mark Peoples wrote:
> 
> Ok. I've been fighting an install of RH6.2 all day today, but can't for the
> life of me get linux to boot from the hd without a fd. argh
> 
> The hard drive is a wdc 31200...CHS = 2484/16/63. (bios sees this fine)
> 
> During the first install, I had two partitions, / and swap. Didn't work.
> Then I tried /, /boot, and swap. Still didn't work.
> 
> I've tried various combos of partitioning. dmegs shows that the kernel saw
> the disk CHS as 621/64/63, even though I put append="hd=2484,16,63" in
> lilo.conf and running lilo.
> 
> fdisk thinks that the disk is also 621/64/63, but printing the parition
> table shows that /boot (/dev/hda1) is below the 1024th cylinder (covers
> 1-6).
> 
> I know that the 'new' lilo does away with the 1024 limit, but,
> unfortunately, the bios in this machine is much too old to meet the
> requirements for the new lilo. =(
> 
> Any ideas? Even at 10M, ftp installs are too long.  =)
> 
> Thanks,
>  Marco

The simplest solution is to create a small root partition:

slick:~# fdisk /dev/hda
[...]
   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1        82     41296+  83  Linux
[...]

This has a distinct advantage, in that it becomes possible to umount
most of your box for maintenance, or mount most of your valuable stuff
read-only, and still keep /tmp, /var, etc writable (you might want to
symlink some of the stuff in /var over to the large partition though,
to avoid spacefilling DoS attacks.) It was also how I sidestepped the
1024 limit long before there was another workaround.

You will probably have to be able to modify your /etc/rc.d/ scripts in
order to get this to work correctly at bootup.

slick:~# ls -l /usr
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           12 Jan  9  2000 /usr ->
/storage/usr/
slick:~# cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda1       /               ext2    defaults                1 1
/dev/hda2       swap            swap    defaults
/dev/hda3       /storage        ext2    defaults                1 2




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