Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 11430
LILO fails to boot on powerup
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
I am running an AMD-K62 300, with Iwill XA100 motherboard. win98 was installed prior to linux. When I initially powerup the machine, LILO (or something) apparently freaks out. The last things I see on the screen is that something is trying to to search for a boot record on the floppy. Then the floppy drive motor LED lights (and stays lit) and the screen displays countless '1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0' This is continually output until I put in the linux boot disk and reset the machine. With the linux boot disk, I boot to linux. After the booting process has finished, I immediately soft reset the machine (without rerunning LILO). I remove the floppy from the drive and I can then boot to win98 or linux and the machine is fine for any number of reboots. It runs fine until I power down the CPU. I have the software powerdown feature of the motherboard enabled so it will turn its own power off. This only appears to happen when the machine is power cycled. I do not believe it matters which OS is running when I power down, linux or win98 although I'm not positive I have tried to reproduce this by halting linux.
I have had similar issues with Lilo on my new Athlon system, but others in our workplace have also had the exact same problem on other K-6 based systems. The issue actually starts with L then goes to 01 01 01 01 infinitely. WE are thinking it has something to do with the size of the drive, and no matter how many times you rewrite lilo to the mbr it will always do this. Sure you can use a floppy, but who really wants to. Does redhat know if there is any way to make lilo work with a drive bigger than one GB? OR is this one of those old legacy issues that we need so people can still use their 386 with linux?
This sounds like you are installing your system without making sure that the entire /boot partition is located in the first 1024 cylinders of the drive. The error you list is what happens when lilo can't find its second stage boot loader. Make sure you aren't setting up a system where the /boot partition is out of lilo's reach.