'
There appears to be a bug in the install procedure which results in the "boot=" line of /etc/lilo.conf identifying the wrong device. At least this was so with my particular disk configuration.

Details:

RedHat Linux 6.1: text based custom install

Disk Configuration:

Primary IDE channel: disk 0 | `Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1583 cylinders` `Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes``` `Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System` `/dev/hda1 1 686 5510263+ 1b Hidden Win95 FAT32` `/dev/hda2 687 1019 2674822+ 1b Hidden Win95 FAT32` `/dev/hda3 * 1020 1021 16065 83 Linux`
Secondary IDE channel: disk 0 | CD ROM
SCSI 0 | `Disk /dev/sda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1106 cylinders` `Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes``` `Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System` `/dev/sda1 * 1 16 128488+ 82 Linux swap` `/dev/sda2 17 1106 8755425 5 Extended` `/dev/sda5 17 781 6144831 83 Linux`

From the above you will see that there are 2 IDE drives and one SCSI. The documentation is pretty clear that given the above configuration that the `/boot` partition a) must reside on the IDE drive, b) be entirely below cylinder 1024 and c) be no more than 16MB. You will also see that these conditions have been met.

Prior to the installation I used Partition Magic v5.0 to create and format `/dev/hda3` as a Linux partition. Also note that PowerQuest''s BootMagic was installed to allow booting to one of two Windows98 configurations (`/dev/hda1` or `/dev/hda2` respectively).

During RedHat''s text based install I elected to install /boot on the existing Linux partition `/dev/hda3,` swap of 124MB on `/dev/sda1` and `/` on `/dev/sda5`. LILO was installed to the root partition. The install proceeded without difficulty. However, the system was not able to boot from except from floppy.

Upon subsequent inspection /etc/lilo.conf was written to specify:

`boot = /dev/sda`

rather than the correct device:

`boot = /dev/hda3`

Altering the `boot` line as indicated immediately above (manually) resolved the problem.

Ken Brown
kbrown@trentu.ca
705.748.1121 x1540

'