SuSE Support Database

Title: Linux above 1024 cylinders and LILO

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Linux above 1024 cylinders and LILO

Symptom:

When booting from a harddrive LILO can't find the bootkernels. It stops at LI - or another incomplete part of the word LILO (see also LILO fails: Error-messages and their interpretation).

Cause:

At boot-up time LILO has only the BIOS drivers at its disposal in order to access the harddrives. Thus the reachable area is limited to

The last two limitations are less severe with modern PCs:

Some recent BIOSses allow the access to further equipment, such as up to four EIDE-harddrives (with EIDE-controller) instead of two. Some really modern combinations of BIOS/SCSI host adapter will allow you to boot from a SCSI-harddrive when EIDE-disks are built into the machine. However these features are not widespread and standardized enough to specify general rules.

Some SCSI host adapters have the ability -- controlled by drivers or your BIOS settings -- to "show" the system various different geometries of the harddrives connected to your PC. Please see section 6.2 (SCSI details) of the Large-Disk-HOWTO

/usr/doc/howto/mini/Large-Disk.gz
for further details.

However there is no way to get around the 1024-cylinder limitation in the moment!

Henceforth we will use the term 1024-cylinder boundary when referring to the reachable area of the harddrive.

Solution:

LILO needs access to the following data which must reside below the 1024-cylinder boundary:

Altogether this is normally less than 2 MByte. /boot and the Linux-kernel usually reside in the Linux root partition. However this is not enforced. In principal it is even possible (but dangerous), to store this data on partitions of other operating systems.

Which possibilities do we have now when taking into account these limitations ?