I want to boot without lilo and keep all my RAM!

marzagao · 04-19-2001, 05:56 PM

Greetings from Brazil!

I just installed RedHat 7.0 a couple of days ago in my Win98 system. I now have a large FAT32 partition and a smaller linux partition at the end of it. I have two related problems:

1. I can't boot linux from the hard drive!
I can boot Win98 just fine, but lilo won't find my linux partition since I placed it after the 1024th cylinder. I want to keep my partitions this way and still boot linux. I've tried loadlin but for some reason it tells me my command.com is corrupt (I guess it doesn't recognize Win98's command.com). So, now I am stuck booting linux from a floppy!

2. I can't use all my RAM!
I have 256Meg of RAM but linux only finds 64. Since I can't use lilo, it seems that lilo.conf is ignored. So, even though I added the much talked about line, append="mem=256M", that doesn't help me.

HELP!!!

Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

trickykid · 04-20-2001, 05:48 AM

If you boot into linux with your floppy, you should be able to fdisk the MBR and then run the /sbin/lilo after editing the lilo.conf file to correct your ram like this:

append="mem=256M"

Then all should be good. Amen.

marzagao · 04-20-2001, 07:51 AM

Thanks trickykid!

But what about booting from the hard drive?
Booting from the floppy takes way too long...

trickykid · 04-20-2001, 10:46 AM

Once you get lilo written to the MBR, that will solve your problem. Make sure to edit it so you have your windows info in there to so you can boot into both.
I had to look again, you say you don't want to boot from lilo or do. If lilo is coming up and you can boot into windows that way, you should be able to boot into linux as well. Your linux partition or boot info is incorrect in lilo.conf it may be. If you can clarify or give your lilo.conf file listed here it might help.

[Edited by trickykid on 04-20-2001 at 11:49 AM]

Copenhagen Cowboy · 04-20-2001, 10:48 AM

Is LILO past 1024th cylinder or your partition past it? If it's your partition, it doesn't matter. LILO has to be in the first 1024, though.

marzagao · 04-20-2001, 01:17 PM

It's not that I didn't want to use lilo. I thought I couldn't.

Following on what Copenhagen Cowboy said, I found a version of lilo (21.7.3) that is able to see a linux partition placed after the 1024th cylinder (like my partition). The RedHat 7.0 distro comes with an old version (1.6) of lilo that doesn't do that.

Well, I'll try it over the weekend and see what happens!

Obrigado!
(Thanks!)