Problems with lilo on a new machine

Cameron Tully-Smith lpstudy at sonic.net
Sat Feb 10 08:49:22 PST 2001


Hi :)

I just installed RedHat Linux 6.2 Deluxe on a new machine (Award 
BIOS).  The machine has a 45GB UDMA IDE Western Digital Caviar hard disk, 
512MB of RAM and an Athlon 750 processor.  The motherboard is an Epox EP-7KXA.

I'm getting "Primary master hard disk fail" when I try to boot off of the 
hard disk.  The Linux install went fine and the machine's setup is set to 
use "Auto" (I could manually override and choose LBA, Large or 
Normal).  The machine boots fine with a boot diskette that was created 
during the Linux install and I'm able to use the hard disk with no problems.

I've already tried uninstalling and reinstalling lilo (i.e., lilo -u and 
then lilo) and changing the boot device to /dev/hda1 instead of /dev/hda in 
/etc/lilo.conf.

Filesystems:
/		~8GB
/root		~2.8GB
/usr/local	~15GB
<swap>	~2GB
/home		~15GB

drive capacity that's being recognized is around 42GB

Any suggestions on where to look on the web or on things to try would be 
greatly appreciated.  The machine is running fine other than the booting 
problem, so I'd rather not reload if I can avoid it (takes hours to make 
the filesystems on this drive, though I could probably at least partially 
avoid that for a reload, so it's not out of the question).

Thanks in advance for any help.

Cameron
lpstudy at sonic.net




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