On May 04, 1996 at 09:02, David Drummond of 3:640/305 wrote:

 PE>> I'm sure I didn't imagine it, so I have been reading the
 PE>> OS/2 2.1 installation manual.  It says that the boot
 PE>> manager partition must be within the first 1024 cylinders
[...]
 DD> BTW I just installed the latest public release of Linux on a 4.5gig drive
 DD> partitioned as one partition at work.  Because the partition spans the
 DD> 1024 cylinder thingy, it won't boot from the harddrive. I must have a
 DD> "startup diskette" in the drive to get it going.  It
loads a bootloader
 DD> from the diskette (I think) and continues booting from the harddrive.

The initial bootstrap must be able to see the drive, regardless of type
(IDE, SCSI, etc.) and therefore will generally rely on the BIOS (Int 0x13)
to get going until it can load its own device drivers, and therefore see
beyond the 1,024 cylinder mark.

By relying on the (traditional) BIOS at the start, the bootstrap is limited
to being below the 1,024 cylinder mark.

Dave, create two Linux partitions - one "root" and the rest as
whatever you want, so that you can boot from the hard disk to the root
partition, then mount the other one during the boot process.  I actually
have five partitions:

(swap)
/
/home
/usr
/var

All are on a 4Gb SCSI drive, with swap and root below the 1,024 cylinder
mark, but the others *way* above it.  Linux boots from root, and mounts the
other partitions on the fly before finally displaying the login prompt.

(Basically because I couldn't be bothered arguing with SCSI/BIOS settings
for LBA or anything else...)

Cheers..


    - dave
    d.begley{at}ieee.org

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