I installed Slackware 10.0 on my old machine and when I reboot I get
something like:

L 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40

ad infinitum.

I'm thinking I shouldn't have put LILO on the MBR?

Anyone know what I did wrong and how to fix it? I don't really know
enough to provide the kind of info that would be pertinent except that I
did the auto LILO configure and I put it on the MBR. There are only two
partitions on the drive: an ext2 linux partition and a linux swap.

It's a very old machine (133mHz, 48M RAM, 2G HD).

Thanks

On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 08:59:48 GMT, "J. W. McCall" <jmccall@houston.rr.com> wrote:
>
> L 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40 40

Two errors give 40, both indicate a serious disconnection between
BIOS, reality and lilo. Suggest you start with BIOS, and try
again. It it were me I'd write zeroes to entire HDD first, reboot
and perform BIOS autodetect.

Slack install: gets easier each time When in doubt, start over.

--Grant.

Grant Coady wrote:
> Two errors give 40, both indicate a serious disconnection between
> BIOS, reality and lilo. Suggest you start with BIOS, and try
> again. It it were me I'd write zeroes to entire HDD first, reboot
> and perform BIOS autodetect.

Yeah, I did some Googling and found some other thing mentioning the
BIOS, but I'm not sure what to do...they said something about older
systems not supporting LBA, but this drive isn't set up as LBA.

The BIOS seems to be able to detect the HD ok. If the HD is set up
correctly in the BIOS, should it work, or is there some other problem?
This machine was running Win98 when I got it and it has the same hard
drive, so I'm wondering what the problem is.

And by write zeroes, what do you mean, clear off the hard drive, remove
partitions, etc?

> Slack install: gets easier each time When in doubt, start over.

Well, I just reinstalled everything and get teh same problem. I tried
putting LILO on the partition instead of the MBR and got the same
result. I used the boot disk I made when I installed and everything
works fine and I can access the HD and everything else, but it won't
boot from the hard drive.

I looked at /etc/lilo.conf and saw nothing that tells me why it would do
this.

And I was surprised at how easy Slack was to install the first time,
actually.

Thanks for the info.

On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 09:55:21 GMT, "J. W. McCall" <jmccall@houston.rr.com> wrote:
>
> Yeah, I did some Googling and found some other thing mentioning the
> BIOS, but I'm not sure what to do...they said something about older
> systems not supporting LBA, but this drive isn't set up as LBA.
Can it be? lilo defaults to LBA Do you have GNU/Linux running
on another box? Then you can RTFM some, otherwise you'll read much
confusing info.
>
> The BIOS seems to be able to detect the HD ok. If the HD is set up
> correctly in the BIOS, should it work, or is there some other problem?
> This machine was running Win98 when I got it and it has the same hard
> drive, so I'm wondering what the problem is.
Seems to be another problem, LBA not active but set in lilo.conf
(default), but you can't change HDD geometry after install...
>
> And by write zeroes, what do you mean, clear off the hard drive, remove
> partitions, etc?

'dd if=/dev/zero bs=4k of=/dev/hdX' will write zeroes to entire drive,
if you do this, then reboot machine, go into BIOS auto-detect drive and
set to LBA. If _no_ LBA option, go to plan B, tell lilo.conf to not use
lba32 LBA preferred.

Plan B
```````
No LBA: need small say 32MB..64MB '/boot' primary near start of drive
so it entirely < cyl. 1023. See 'man lilo.conf' for older drives.
>
> > Slack install: gets easier each time When in doubt, start over.
>
> Well, I just reinstalled everything and get teh same problem. I tried

Well, at least you get through install okay, it is fairly fast. I'm
thinking third time lucky Put lilo in MBR.

--Grant.

Ok, I put in another (bigger) HD which is detected as LBA (which leads
to a Win/Win Situation(TM)). Reinstall absolute minimum Slack. It now
boots fine with great joy. So now I'm reinstalling again (four times in
one night) with correct partitions, the software I want, etc.

Thanks for the info. I'm glad things are working now.

An sidenote...the BIOS detects the new drive as LBA, but doesn't see the
whole drive (only about 8 gigs. Fdisk, however sees all 15GB.

On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:57:28 GMT, "J. W. McCall" <jmccall@houston.rr.com> wrote:
> Ok, I put in another (bigger) HD which is detected as LBA (which leads
> to a Win/Win Situation(TM)). Reinstall absolute minimum Slack. It now
> boots fine with great joy. So now I'm reinstalling again (four times in
> one night) with correct partitions, the software I want, etc.
Great!
>
> An sidenote...the BIOS detects the new drive as LBA, but doesn't see the
> whole drive (only about 8 gigs. Fdisk, however sees all 15GB.

BIOS is old, only used to boot, make sure bootable stays below the
8GB, 'should' be okay -- I've not put a disk that big into such old
box

There's a large-drive-howto under /usr/src/doc/... explain issues.
(large being > 500MB, dated but useful)

--Grant.

Grant Coady wrote:

> On Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:57:28 GMT, "J. W. McCall" <jmccall@houston.rr.com>
> wrote:
>> Ok, I put in another (bigger) HD which is detected as LBA (which leads
>> to a Win/Win Situation(TM)). Reinstall absolute minimum Slack. It now
>> boots fine with great joy. So now I'm reinstalling again (four times in
>> one night) with correct partitions, the software I want, etc.
> Great!
>>
>> An sidenote...the BIOS detects the new drive as LBA, but doesn't see the
>> whole drive (only about 8 gigs. Fdisk, however sees all 15GB.
>
> BIOS is old, only used to boot, make sure bootable stays below the
> 8GB, 'should' be okay -- I've not put a disk that big into such old
> box
>
> There's a large-drive-howto under /usr/src/doc/... explain issues.
> (large being > 500MB, dated but useful)
>
> --Grant.

An easier fix might have been to redo the MBR on the old drive. It can be
done with the MSDOS version of fdisk. Then using cfdisk repartition the
drive. Put lilo on a partition.

Just FYI. Been there, done that.
--
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters

On 2005-06-08, J. W. McCall <jmccall@houston.rr.com> wrote:

> Yeah, I did some Googling and found some other thing mentioning the
> BIOS, but I'm not sure what to do...they said something about older
> systems not supporting LBA, but this drive isn't set up as LBA.

There might be an "lba32" line in lilo.conf. Taking that out might
help. You may have to replace it with "geometric".

From the lilo man page:

Error code 40 is generated by the BIOS, or by LILO during
the conversion of a linear (24-bit) disk address to a geo-
metric (C:H:S) address. On older systems which do not
support lba32 (32-bit) addressing, this error may also be
generated.

--
e-Harmony.com called the cops after I sent in my personality profile.