LILO woe

[Wazz]

I'm having problems with LILO now that I've done the HDD install. I've been using a boot disk until now but I decided to install LILO instead. When I try and run /sbin/lilo, I'm greeted with the following response:

LILO is unable to correctly determine the device codes assigned to two
of your disks by the System BIOS.  Consequently, it seems to have guessed
wrong.  The following conflict needs to be resolved with explicit
    "disk=/dev/...  bios=0x??" lines in '/etc/lilo.conf'.

Fatal: Bios device code 0x80 is being used by two disks
        /dev/ataraid/d0 (0x7200)  and  /dev/hdg (0x2200)

This is a bit of a bugger because these disks are both attached to my RAID controller (PDC20276, currently being used as ATA133 rather than RAID). The two disks attached to the controller are /dev/hde (/dev/ataraid/d0 - Windows install) and /dev/hdg (/dev/ataraid/d1 - Linux). I've never had any problems installing LILO to the MBR of /dev/hde in the past when I've been using Mandrake/RH/SuSE so I'm not sure how to resolve this. My /etc/lilo.conf hasn't been changed from the one created during the HDD install:

boot=/dev/hde
vga=791
prompt
timeout=50
append = "hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi hdh=scsi apm=power-off nomce"

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.4.20-xfs
        label=knoppix
        root=/dev/hdg5
        read-only
        initrd=/boot/initrd.gz

## A Windows installation, example for partition 1 on first IDE harddisk
# other=/dev/hda1
#       label=dos
#       optional
#       table=/dev/hda

Can anyone help?

[rickenbacherus]

You might try adding something like this to lilo.conf:

# Overrides the default mapping between harddisk names and the BIOS'
# harddisk order. Use with caution.
disk=/dev/hde
    bios=0x81

disk=/dev/hdg
    bios=0x80

First try with just "disk=/dev/hde bios=0x81" and if that doesn't work try adding the second one. Make sense?

[Wazz]

Yeah I've already tried doing that. When I did disk=/dev/hde bios=0x80 it gave me the same error message but said that this time it was /dev/hdg and /dev/ataraid/d1 that had the same BIOS code (as you'd hope since they're the same disk!)

[Ken Beal]

Hi,

I'm having the same problem. I am not running RAID, but I do have 7 devices, 4 on the 2 regular channels and 3 on the 2 HPT channels (one slave is empty).

It's complaining about the following:

root@knoppix-klb:~# /sbin/lilo
Warning: Unable to determine video adapter in use in the present system.
Added Linux *
Skipping /vmlinuz.old
Added Other(hdg1)

LILO is unable to correctly determine the device codes assigned to two
of your disks by the System BIOS.  Consequently, it seems to have guessed
wrong.  The following conflict needs to be resolved with explicit
    "disk=/dev/...  bios=0x??" lines in '/etc/lilo.conf'.

Fatal: Bios device code 0x81 is being used by two disks
        /dev/hdg (0x2200)  and  /dev/hde (0x2100)
root@knoppix-klb:~#

I tried uncommenting both of the "bios" lines (first the first, then both) and it still gave me the same error. As the original poster said, I have a boot floppy which I can continue to use but I'd like to be able to configure it to boot from the hard drive. What am I doing wrong?

The "bios" lines are:

#disk=/dev/hde
#    bios=0x81

#disk=/dev/sda
#    bios=0x80

Only one of them refers to one of the drives in conflict (hde and hdg), but I don't want to break anything so I'm stopping here.

Why would two drives have the same device code? Windows 2000 doesn't complain about it (for reference, not to start a flame war).

If you need further information about my system I'll be happy to provide it. Thanks!

[rickenbacherus]

Fatal: Bios device code 0x81 is being used by two disks
/dev/hdg (0x2200) and /dev/hde (0x2100)
root@knoppix-klb:~#

From man lilo.conf:

disk=<device-name>
Defines non-standard parameters for the specified disk. See sec-
tion "Disk geometry" of user.tex for details. Especially useful
is the `bios=' parameter. The BIOS numbers your disks 0x80, 0x81,
etc. and it is impossible to decide which Linux disk corresponds
to which BIOS disk (since this depends on the BIOS setup, and on
the type of BIOS), so if you have an unusual setup you need to
state the correspondence between Linux disks and BIOS disks. For
example,

disk=/dev/sda
bios=0x80
disk=/dev/hda
bios=0x81

would say that your SCSI disk is the first BIOS disk, and your
(primary master) IDE disk is the second BIOS disk. Other options
include the specification of disk geometry; e.g.,

disk=/dev/fd0
sectors=18
heads=2
cylinders=80

With that in mind, try this:

sudo /sbin/lilo -v3 -t

That should tell you what you need to enter in LILO.

Try something like this for example:

disk=/dev/hde
bios=0x80

disk=/dev/hdg
bios=0x81