Booting Linux from LS 120 Drives?

A member of Clan Anonymous Coward asks: "Does anyone know HOW to get these things to boot Linux? I have done a WWW search and found mailing-list messages that say it can be done. I have tried with Linux 2.0.36 off an LS 120 disk and all I got was continuous screenfuls of binary numbers scrolling off the screen. As far as I can determine LILO boot block did not even start execution. I tried formating the disk as /dev/hda and /dev/hda2 and both gave me similar results. The /dev/hda2 attempt had 'linear' in lilo.conf. Do I need a later version of lilo?"

When you've seen one BIOS, you've seen one BIOS

[nor]

I'm 1 for 2 with a 2.0.36 kernel with LILO 20. Results seem to vary with BIOS:

AMI BIOS 1.16a on a Tyan S1836 Thunder 100 motherboard: LILO works, but in the BIOS setup, you have to change ARMD emulation from Auto to hard disk.

OTOH, using a Packard Bell with Award BIOS (I don't have the version # here), I couldn't make it work. I tried every LILO incantation I could find; got nothing but L01 01 01... I also tried writing a kernel directly to the disk. That gets "Loading .............", then hangs.

It's too bad--painfully slow, but it makes for one hell of a rescue disk. Now if it would only work on more than one computer I know of....

On both systems, I could use a 1.44M floppy to boot, then use the root filesystem on the LS-120. Swell, if you want an LS-120 and a standard floppy.

C'est la PC.

Set the bios to boot LS120 first

[Scott_F]

I've got just my LS120 drive (not 1.44) and it runs fine. only catch is that the BIOS has to know how to handle the LS120. In mine (award 4.51g), it gives the "boot order" option to be "LS120,C:".

but it sounds like your BIOS is booting the LS120 fine, just that lilo is getting garbled somewhere.

i've heard though that the LS120 disks have 4 or 5 partitions, and the last one is the one that it actually uses. (use the linux fdisk program to view the partition info to make sure). try writing the lilo info there and reboot. if that doesn't work, try each one sequentially until it does. sorry i don't have an exact solution. :) if you find the solution, please post.

Set the bios to boot LS120 first

[nor]

The machine I mentioned earlier (I'm at it now): a Packard Bell 880 with Award v4.51PG. I had it set to boot LS120, and it still didn't work. However, I didn't write LILO to the "last partition.": I either repartitioned it, or wrote the fs to the whole device (/dev/hdc.) Either way, it failed as described previously.

Can you post or email me the lilo.conf you got it to work with?

!||

My Experiences

[Ignacio]

I have an LS-120, and I managed to get LILO working on it just fine. The trick is to tell lilo that /dev/hd? has a BIOS code of 0x00. I also find that giving the params also helps:

disk=/dev/hda
bios=0x00
cylinders=963
heads=32
sectors=8

Then to put it on, you run lilo as you normally would.

CAVEAT: On SCSI-only systems, lilo complains if you try to put it on the LS-120 through command-line arguments pointing to the LS-120. The correct way to do this (for me, I don't know about others) is to put the LS-120 disk in the drive and just run lilo against the hard disk. If you run lilo against the hard disk without a disk in the drive, it complains about /dev/hda not existing or something. I believe that it's because lilo does IDE devices first.

P.S.: Does anybody have a SCSI floppy drive they're looking to get rid of?

SCSI Floppy Drives???

[unitron]

Do such things exist? And speaking of hardware items of interest to perhaps 3 people on the entire planet, does anyone know of a PCI bus IDE/floppy controller and I/O and game port card? I thought I'd tracked down a DTC part number but the chips it was to use failed to materialize.

they do indeed seem to exist

[Paul Robinson]

http://www.sqa.net/tadpole/

i think i got that from slashdot, but i don't remember... anyway, the machines come with scsi floppy drives, but i think they are external. last time i checked, pricewatch has an entry for scsi floppy drives.

as for the second item, that would seem to be a very packed card. but hey, i don't know.

PCI bus SuperIO

[the_tsi]

Old mac donald had a farm.. IDEIO.

Most PCI-based implementations of basic I/O ports (serial, parallel, game) tend to be non-standard and therefore windows-only. I'd imagine that most companies which ship PCI-based IDE cards figure anyone with a PCI bus has on-board Super IO, since it's embedded in intel and third-party's chipsets.

Of course, if you want an ISA one, I've got cases... :)

-Chris

SCSI Floppy Drives??? Yes!!!

[red_dragon]

Yes, such thingees exist; most of them are flopticals, though. The way I remember, some SCSI host adapters have/had an option to make the floptical appear as A:. But damn, I've never seen one of those beasts.

boot 'n root

[Th0th]

Hey all,
I've had no problem whatsoever getting the ls120 to boot linux, so long as the ls120 is not my root partition. It (says it) mounts the ls120 partition, then claims it can't find init and panics. Here's what I've done. I've fdisked the floppy, and created a partition (/dev/hda1) on it. I then formatted hda1, and mounted it under floppy. Afterwhich, I copied /etc, /sbin, and /bin to /floppy. (so that when hda1 is the root directory, the kernel should be able to find /sbin/init). Here's my lilo.conf...

boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda1
prompt
compact
disk=/dev/hda bios=0
install=/floppy/boot/boot.b
map=/floppy/boot/map
image=/floppy/boot/bzImage
label=Linux
read-only

As I said before, this works great. It gets through the whole lilo process, and mounts the hda1 as the root partition (At least it says it does) but then it dies saying it can't find init, which should clearly be there. Any ideas???