This problem is not what it first seemed (BIOS unable to talk to 4 disks). My system has 4 disks, 2 SCSI (ID 0 and 1) and 2 IDE (hda and hdc). / is on sda5, and /boot is on sda1, which is in cylinders 1 and 2 only. I'm using the MBR in sda and the BIOS is set to boot off SCSI, not IDE. The BIOS can talk to all disks. This worked fine in 5.0, which I ran for 2 years with this boot disk, a Seagate Cheetah 4.1 GB UWSCSI on a motherboard-resident aic7xxx. It's an AMI BIOS vintage 9/1997 on a SuperMicro dual-CPU motherboard. Under 6.1, running lilo (accepting the "not first disk" warning) and rebooting gives a "LI" boot hang. I have not moved /boot/boot.b since running lilo, and there is no indication that the geometry is being reported incorrectly. So, I disable IDE and mark the 2 IDE disks as "not installed" in the BIOS, and boot off a floppy (booting off the floppy works fine no matter what). I run lilo again with the same lilo.conf. I go into the BIOS, enable the IDE disks, and it boots fine, with all 4 disks, just like it used to. I bought the two IDE disks recently, likely since my last time running lilo under 5.0, so it's possible this problem is not new. Clearly, lilo is installing two different bits of code into the sda MBR, depending on whether there are other disks present. However, the code installed with just SCSI disks works fine with both SCSI and IDE disks present and the BIOS set to boot off SCSI. The code installed with SCSI and IDE disks present doesn't work at all. I know Red Hat doesn't officially support the configuration I have (boot off SCSI with 2 IDE disks present), but since it's clearly a bug I figured I'd report it. I'm configured as I am because I need the largest contiguous disk partitions possible, so my little SCSI disk is the right place for the OS and boot. I discovered the problem when I installed 6.1 and then couldn't boot, when it had worked before. lilo.conf: boot=/dev/sda map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b prompt timeout=50 default=linux image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.12-20smp label=linux initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.12-20smp.img read-only root=/dev/sda5 image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.12-20 label=linux-up initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.12-20.img read-only root=/dev/sda5 --jh--
I am not shure that this can help to you, but I have the same LI freeze screen when booting from SCSI disk (wel, I do not have IDE disks). I add the 'linear' option to the lilo file and boot works fine. I have now some problems with the SMP booting but this is another story. Here are first lines of my /etc/lilo.conf file boot=/dev/sda map=/boot/map install=/boot/boot.b prompt linear timeout=50 image=/boot/vmlinuz
I can confirm that there appears to be a lilo bug in systems that have both IDE and SCSI hard drives, and which boot off of the SCSI drives. I have an ABIT BP6 (dual Celeron 366) with two PCI SCSI adapters (Adaptec 2930U and BusLogic BT- 930), as well as the on-board PIIX4 and HPT366 IDE adapters. (Whew!) I have a DAT drive (st0) and a CD-ROM drive (sr0) attached to the Adaptec, two hard disks (sda and sdb) attached to the BusLogic, and one hard disk (hda) attached to the PIIX4. (I don't use the HPT366 adapter.) I have WinNT Workstation 4 SP5 installed on sda and use its boot loader to choose between it and Linux. I performed a custom install with RH 6.1 (retail) and the updated boot disk. The install went fine and created a boot floppy which always lets me boot to Linux, but all I ever got was "LI" when trying to boot to Linux without the floppy. After reading this bug report I disabled the PIIX4 in my BIOS, booted to Linux via floppy, re-ran LILO, rebooted to NT, ran bootpart, rebooted again, selected Linux from the NT loader, still got stuck at "LI". Damn. Powered down, opened my case, unplugged the power cable from the IDE drive, re- ran LILO and bootpart, selected Linux from the NT loader. Worked! (Had to comment-out hda from fstab, though, before I could make it to runlevel 5.) Here's my lilo.conf: boot=/dev/sdb1 install=/boot/boot.b prompt timeout=50 image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.3.34 label=linux-2.3.34 read-only root=/dev/sdb1 image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.12-20smp label=linux-2.2.12smp initrd=/boot/initrd-2.2.12-20smp.img read-only root=/dev/sdb1 Note that I used to have "disk=/dev/sdb bios=0x82" in there because lilo would complain that it might not be able to see sdb. Lilo doesn't seem to need this statement in there anymore, though. HTH...
Assigned to dledford
If you have both IDE and SCSI hard drives, then you need to add map statements to the lilo.conf to get it to properly figure out device ordering. Unfortunately, there's no way to reliably get boot device ordering information on x86 platforms