Hello,
Thanks to all who made suggestions for my LILO
problem (it would not recognize the default label,
i.e. it would not start after 5 seconds as set up
in /etc/lilo.conf.
I have tried all your suggestions with LILO, i.e. creating
a /boot separate partition, placing it and/or / at the
beginning of the drive, giving them different partitions types
and/or names (/dev/hda1, /dev/hda5, ....).
Eventually I just gave up. Now I have a system which still
won't boot by itself, i.e. wait forever at the LILO prompt.
If I just hit enter, or type linux, it boots fine, and MANDRAKE 7.1
looks quite cool, actually.
The boot thing sucks, but since it's not a server box, I
can live with it, temporarily.
When I'll have perfected a backup procedure for the whole
drive, I'll try again to fiddle with LILO and/or GRUB.
A final note however: the problem is not just that this version of
LILO doesn't likes > 1024 cylinders, because:
1) SAME HD and BIOS worked just fine with MANDRAKE 6.1
2) As I showed in the original posting, I did put either / or /boot
at the beginning of the drive (or so the install tool told me)
3) I am surely missing something here, but is it possible that LILO
doesn't see more than 1024 cylinders.... unless you just hit <ENTER>?
4) A clue for whoever can understand it: the big differences between
my self-booting Mandrake 6.1 install and this are:
I installed 6.1 with LILO on the MBR: I wasn't given this option
during the expert installation process.
With 6.1, I just choose two partitions, / and swap. This time,
feeling though I wanted to have /, /usr, and /home on separate
partitions.
Thanks again to all who helped and to whoever just went through
all this rambling. Any light is appreciated.
Ciao,
Marco
