From: sander@cwi.nl (Sander Plomp) Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: linux-0.98 patchlevel 6 Date: 7 Dec 1992 12:36:31 GMT
torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Torvalds) writes:
>The problem is that lilo (and possible shoelace if somebody is still
>using it) seems to mess around with the boot sector information that is
>used to pass the data to the kernel. At least some versions of lilo
>have this problem: not all do (it works fine for me and lilo 0.4).
>The solution is either to find a lilo binary that works or to boot up
>from a floppy (slow, I know). Hope this will be solved (new release of
>lilo, almesber?) soon.
>>But the nightmare continued. The next problem I've found is related
>>to video preselection. Setup.S gets wrong informations and so
>>I have got one of this ugly SVGA-modes ;).
>Same problem - the idea being that the video-mode is no longer hardcoded
>into the kernel, but easy to change like the root device. Sadly, it got
>bitten by the loader problems..
I had a similar problem when I installed SLS a week ago. The system booted
fine from floppy, but when I used lilo to boot from hard disk linux
came up in 40 character mode (ugly!). After spending a whole weekend
cursing rdev -v I found out lilo is to blame. When I use
linux=/Image
there is no problem, and the correct video mode is used. However, using
linux=/Image,/dev/hda2
to set the root device from within lilo messes things up. It does work
(i.e. the right root device is set) but it also changes the video mode
to zero (i.e. 25x40). It seems lilo writes more bytes than it should.
Presumably setting the swap partition in lilo also does some damage.
The solution to me was not using the lilo options for setting root or
swap partiotion, but instead use rdev to set what is needed. Oh, the
compiled rdev in SLS didn't recognize -v properly but the source is
in the SLS distribution too and it did work (despite being incredible
ugly). So the proper way to make the SLS distributed linux bootable
from hardddisk seems to be:
- recompile rdev
- use rdev to set root partition, video mode, and, if you want,
ramsize and swap partition for /Image. (I use no ramdisk and set the
swap using fstab and swapon)
- compile lilo (no binaries are present) (use "make install" to
get it installed into /etc/lilo ?)
- adapt /etc/lilo/install to your taste, but do not set root partition
or swap partition with it.
- call /etc/lilo/install (with its full name, since "install" is also
a completly different program)
- sync, reboot and pray.
-- Sander Plomp Internet: Sander.Plomp@cwi.nl