Red Hat 6.2 Installation

[Mark J. Dulcey]

"Matthew J. Brodeur" wrote:
> 
>    This sounds exactly like the problem I was having with a laptop at
> Softpro a few weeks ago.  The issue is actually LILO's (Linux's boot
> loader) ability to see past some certiain point on the disk. In this case
> it was a problem with anything past 8GB.  This is only a problem at
> boot time, when LILO has to grab the kernel from disk and load it
> into memory.  Once the kernel takes over, the limitations are
> (mostly) gone. There are supposed to be flags that will allow newer
> BIOSes to tell newer LILOs how to see the whole disk. I personally
> couldn't make it work as such.
> 
>    The solution is usually to make a small 10-20MB /boot partition BELOW
> the 8GB point on the drive. On a new system it's best to put it first on
> the drive, but that's not necessary. On the laptop I was working on, the
> /boot ended up just after the 5GB primary Win98 partition. Disk Druid (the
> partitioning tool under RedHat) would complain about the / partition being
> too big until I created /boot.  Then it would let me do anything I wanted
> with / .
> 
>    Now, this workaround MIGHT not be needed if you partition with fdisk
> (or Partition Magic, or whatever), and find the right LILO settings.  In
> your case however, I'd just do it the easy way until you're feeling more
> experimental.

The latest versions of lilo also don't have this problem, at least if
you also have a newish computer; LBA32 support has been added, and that
allows you to boot off any hard disk currently available. (The
theoretical limit is somewhere in the terabytes.) Unfortunately, no
current distribution actually comes with a sufficiently new version of
lilo, though the next round of updates probably will.
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