Harddrive probs... ;-)

[^chewie <chewie@wookimus.net>]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 12:34:56PM -0600, Justin Coyne wrote:

> I'm having some trouble with lilo. When I boot the drive in an old
> machine (486DX) I get "LIL-"
>
> The lilo documnetation says this error means: The descriptor table is
> corrupt. This can either be caused by a geometry mismatch or by moving
> /boot/map without running the map installer.
>
> If I boot the drive in a newer machine LILO works fine and the machine
> boots.  How can I solve this problem?

I've had this happen before as well, when I moved my harddrive from an old
486 to a "new" Pent 166.  I had set the BIOS harddrive type to LBA on the
Pent, whereas the 486 was set up as CHS.  I would only get as far as "LI"
and then it would hang.  When I changed the drive type back to CHS, or
"normal", it worked just fine.

So, it all stems to drive geometry.  If you formatted the harddrive when
an LBA geometry, you may not be able to use it via CHS.  I'm certainly not
the person to talk to.  The Lilo HOWTO contains a lot of good information
about drive geometry.  There may be a few other HOWTO's and manuals out
there for you to reference.  As a last resort, you could either call
OnTrack and see if you can get some free advice, or simply reformat the
drive.  If you had it in another machine and have enough HD space to
create a backup copy of the info, do a 'dd if=/dev/<littledrive>
of=~backup/littledrive.bin bs=512.'  Then reboot your machine, change your
BIOS setting to be CHS w/the right number of cyls, heads, and sectors.
Remount the drive in Linux and do a 'dd if=~backup/littledrive.bin
of=/dev/<littledrive> bs=512'.

That <should> work.

-- 
Chad Walstrom                         mailto:chewie@wookimus.net 
a.k.a ^chewie, gunnarr               http://wookimus.net/~chewie

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best." --Duke Ellington