[ale] RH6 +NT +Win98 +LILO = less-hair

[Paul D. Manno]

Hello ALE-ers,

A friend of mine brought me a system today with a problem I'll turn to the
list to help resolve.  He has a nice PII-450 box, 3 IDE drives and an IDE
CD-ROM.  All fairly recent equipment.  The BIOS supports large drives.

The problem is, I could not seem to convince LILO to boot the nice Linux
installation from other than a floppy drive.  If you wish to help, read on
for the details.  Otherwise, accept my apology for YA long LILO question.

Here's the layout:

He's installed Win98 on IDE 0 (hda), master drive (8GB)
He's installed NT 4  on IDE 0 (hdb), slave drive (2G partition on 6GB)
The CD-ROM is supported IDE 1 (hdc), master
RedHat 6's installed on IDE 1 (hdd), slave drive (2G partition on 10G)

RedHat's install went fine throwing stuff on hdd1 and ran the LILO install
successfully to /dev/hda.  Booting shows  LI (hang) or second stage fail.
I installed a simple RH 6 partition on hdb3 (all under 1024 cyl) and the
new installed LILO reports "LI".  Humpf!  Tried adding "linear" - nope.

The essential LILO lines are:

boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.5-15
    label=linux
    root=/dev/hdd1
    initrd=/boot/initrd
    read-only
other = /dev/hda1
    label = win
    table = /dev/hda
other = /dev/hdb1
    label = nt
    table = /dev/hdb

I made the boot floppy for /dev/hdd1 - works fine.  Replacing /dev/hda's
MBR still allows W98 & NT to boot using the NT boot loader.  Re-installing
LILO still results in LI (hang).

I verified the lilo.conf on the working boot floppy which matches well.
Running "lilo -v -v -t" shows no errors or warnings.

He (and I) will appreciate any insights or questions you can provide.

-- Paul