I INSTALLED RH 7 OK BUT WHEN I BOOT I ONLY GET L (AND A BLINKING CURSER) WHEN I USE THE BOOT DISK LILO LOADS BUT WHEN IT BEGINS TO LOAD LYNIX I GET AN ERROR 0 x10 ERROR IF I TAKE THE DISK OUT I GET 0x 80 ERROR AND I CANNOT BOOT WINDOWS HOW CAN I GET THINGS GOING NOW PLEASE HELP
This is a misconfiguration of the /boot area of your linux system. The /boot partition on the hard drive must lie entirely within the first 1024 cylinders of your hard drive. If it doesn't, then linux won't be able to boot from the hard drive. Most likely, since you had Windows on the machine first, you didn't get the /boot partition low enough on the hard drive for the BIOS to be able to read it. You *might* be able to solve this problem by switching your BIOS to use LBA access mode for your hard drive if it isn't already using it. That's why the lilo prompt only came up as a L and a blinking cursor. Note: I'm closing this bug out and marking it as NOTABUG because this limitation of lilo has been around since it was first written and has been documented in so many places, including Red Hat's basic getting started guide, that it's considered common knowledge and not a bug in lilo that it doesn't work over 1024 cylinders. However, I'm going to open a new bug against the installer that complains that the installer should check your boot partition to make sure it's a valid partition for lilo to use before proceeding with the installation. Now, the reason Windows won't boot is also because lilo can't be loaded. Lilo is responsible for starting Windows in a dual boot situation. If lilo isn't working, then nothing will boot. The reason the floppy disk is giving you errors when you try to boot from it is because the floppy disk has a bad sector. That gives you error number 0x10. Pulling the floppy back out then confuses things more and gives you error number 0x80. My suggestion would be to boot from CD-ROM into rescue mode (the large message that comes up when the CD-ROM boots tells how to do this), and then in rescue mode you can do what's necessary to recover your system (I don't have the time to write a recovery manual here, there already exists plenty of documentation on how to recover your system, including a small amount in the Red Hat manuals, so I would start looking those documents up).