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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98) Installing RH7 on Dell XPSR350, 384M memory, 8G IDE, 9G SCSI, 20G IDE (Quantum Fireball). Want to put Linux on the 20G IDE, which RH7 identifies as hdb. 16MB /boot partition, ~1.5G /root, 133MB swap partitions. Choose to put the MBR on the /boot partition. Boot using SystemCommander (or not, if I shift hdb to top of boot order in BIOS, it still acts the same) and choose the /boot partition on the 20G drive to boot from. 'LI' appears on screen and hangs. Bug# 19027 mentions this, and one of the respondees says he changed his BIOS to mode 2. On my Dell BIOS I do not have that option. However, I can boot any MS-DOS product to ANY partion I choose on any of my 3 disk drives. I have d/l and installed LOADLIN and boot into Win98's config.sys and call linux from there, using loadlin.exe, but I think this is kinda mickey mouse. If Microsoft can make an operational boot loader why can't the geniuses at GNU? Oh yes, I tried Dell BIOS flash levels A03 and A13, got same result. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Choose to install RH7 on 20G hdb 2. Use a 16MB /boot partition 3. Use a Dell XPSR BIOS - flash level A03 or A13
My Dell CPx also exhibits this condition, and goes a step further: after printing "LI" on the screen for about 1/4 of a second, it reboots, continuing this loop until I physically power the system down. Booting with a rescue disk, modifying lilo.conf, taking out "linear" and inserting "lba32", running lilo, and rebooting fixes the problem, but we really do need to fix the logic anaconda uses to make it's decision. I know there's got to be something in the BIOS we can hook into. Others are doing it. We can do it.
Unfortunately, the bios doesn't always give the proper information. We always give you the option of manually enabling the option in newer releases, though and do a better job of detecting it by default.