Large HD, old BIOS

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Mon, 3 May 2004, at 9:08am, colet at code-energy.com wrote:
> With lilo, it seems to just hang.  I get LI .... and then nothing.

  That means LILO loaded what it though should be the second-stage boot
loader, but had a problem executing it (possibly because it loaded the wrong
thing).  This might mean a geometry mismatch between the kernel and the
BIOS.

  You can try installing the boot loader and kernel image on a floppy disk,
and booting from that.  That will typically bypass any issues with the BIOS
and the hard drive, and gives you a more useful debugging platform.

> With grub, I get various and sundry errors.  It claims to "be loading" and
> then it'll give me a (inconsistent) numeric error code.

  Inconsistent results often mean bad hardware.  You might try running
Memtest86 and/or "badblocks -w".  Note that running that badblocks command
will DESTROY ALL DATA on the disk.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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