Booting Linux from LS 120 Drives? 13
A member of Clan Anonymous Coward
asks: "Does anyone know HOW to get these things to boot
Linux? I have done a WWW search and found mailing-list
messages that say it can be done. I have tried with
Linux 2.0.36 off an LS 120 disk and all I got was
continuous screenfuls of binary numbers scrolling off the
screen. As far as I can determine LILO boot block did not
even start execution. I tried formating the disk as
/dev/hda and /dev/hda2 and both gave me similar results.
The /dev/hda2 attempt had 'linear' in lilo.conf. Do I
need a later version of lilo?"
When you've seen one BIOS, you've seen one BIOS (Score:1)
AMI BIOS 1.16a on a Tyan S1836 Thunder 100 motherboard: LILO works, but in the BIOS setup, you have to change ARMD emulation from Auto to hard disk.
OTOH, using a Packard Bell with Award BIOS (I don't have the version # here), I couldn't make it work. I tried every LILO incantation I could find; got nothing but L01 01 01... I also tried writing a kernel directly to the disk. That gets "Loading
It's too bad--painfully slow, but it makes for one hell of a rescue disk. Now if it would only work on more than one computer I know of....
On both systems, I could use a 1.44M floppy to boot, then use the root filesystem on the LS-120. Swell, if you want an LS-120 and a standard floppy.
C'est la PC.
Set the bios to boot LS120 first (Score:1)
but it sounds like your BIOS is booting the LS120 fine, just that lilo is getting garbled somewhere.
i've heard though that the LS120 disks have 4 or 5 partitions, and the last one is the one that it actually uses. (use the linux fdisk program to view the partition info to make sure). try writing the lilo info there and reboot. if that doesn't work, try each one sequentially until it does. sorry i don't have an exact solution.
Set the bios to boot LS120 first (Score:1)
Can you post or email me the lilo.conf you got it to work with?
!||
My Experiences (Score:1)
disk=/dev/hda
bios=0x00
cylinders=963
heads=32
sectors=8
Then to put it on, you run lilo as you normally would.
CAVEAT: On SCSI-only systems, lilo complains if you try to put it on the LS-120 through command-line arguments pointing to the LS-120. The correct way to do this (for me, I don't know about others) is to put the LS-120 disk in the drive and just run lilo against the hard disk. If you run lilo against the hard disk without a disk in the drive, it complains about /dev/hda not existing or something. I believe that it's because lilo does IDE devices first.
P.S.: Does anybody have a SCSI floppy drive they're looking to get rid of?
SCSI Floppy Drives??? (Score:1)
they do indeed seem to exist (Score:1)
i think i got that from slashdot, but i don't remember... anyway, the machines come with scsi floppy drives, but i think they are external. last time i checked, pricewatch has an entry for scsi floppy drives.
as for the second item, that would seem to be a very packed card. but hey, i don't know.
PCI bus SuperIO (Score:1)
Most PCI-based implementations of basic I/O ports (serial, parallel, game) tend to be non-standard and therefore windows-only. I'd imagine that most companies which ship PCI-based IDE cards figure anyone with a PCI bus has on-board Super IO, since it's embedded in intel and third-party's chipsets.
Of course, if you want an ISA one, I've got cases...
-Chris
SCSI Floppy Drives??? Yes!!! (Score:1)
boot 'n root (Score:1)
I've had no problem whatsoever getting the ls120 to boot linux, so long as the ls120 is not my root partition. It (says it) mounts the ls120 partition, then claims it can't find init and panics. Here's what I've done. I've fdisked the floppy, and created a partition (/dev/hda1) on it. I then formatted hda1, and mounted it under floppy. Afterwhich, I copied
boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda1
prompt
compact
disk=/dev/hda bios=0
install=/floppy/boot/boot.b
map=/floppy/boot/map
image=/floppy/boot/bzImage
label=Linux
read-only
As I said before, this works great. It gets through the whole lilo process, and mounts the hda1 as the root partition (At least it says it does) but then it dies saying it can't find init, which should clearly be there. Any ideas???