"Howard Chu" <XYZ.hyc@highlandsun.com> wrote in message
news:f7-dnSdua8tQk43fRVn-2g@comcast.com...
> I've been trying to get a new AMD64 system set up and booted, with no luck
> so far. Installing SuSE 9.2 on an Asus A8V. There are 4 SATA drives on the
> system, two on the Promise PDC20378 in RAID0 mode, and two on the onboard
> VIA 6420/8237. I have Windows XP Pro SP1 installed on the PDC, and I've
> formatted the other two SATA drives as Dynamic Disks, so that I can setup
> striping on them in both Windows and Linux.
>
> SATA drive sdc has 3 interesting partitions - 512MB for Linux swap,
> 32MB ext2fs for /boot, and 5GB for Linux software raid root.

SuSE is not your friend for weird setups, and Promise is not your friend for
*ANYTHING*.

> drive sdd has 2 partitions - 512MB for Linux swap, and 5GB for Linux
> software raid root.
>
> After a lot of googling I found that grub doesn't support LDM, but lilo is
> supposed to. The SuSE installer has no trouble copying all the packages
> onto the 10GB /dev/md0. But I can't get this thing to boot at all.
>
> When I try to run lilo with boot=/dev/sdc and boot this drive, I get
> L 99 99 99 99 99 <screenful of 99s> and nothing else.
>
> I tried installing lilo onto a floppy instead, so at least I get my boot
> menu now. But when I try to boot SuSE I get "BDA too big" and then
> nothing. So far googling for this error message hasn't turned up anything.
> What next?

SuSE has badly, badly broken grub in a lot of different ways. If you want to
explore a new, weird hardware setup like this, I urge you to explore Fedora
Core 3 instead.