Re: tlug: LILO Vs. 1024 cylinders

[Rex Walters <rex@example.com>]

On Tue, Oct 06, 1998 at 09:14:20AM +0900, Scott Stone wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> > 
> > As I type, I'm making an ext2fs on my new 6.4 GB IBM drive, and I have a
> > question just to make sure I don't tripped up a little later.  When I
> > ran fdisk on this drive to partition it, I was warned that the drive has
> > over 1024 cylinders (yeah, it has over 12,000!) and that this could be a
> > problem for LILO.  So what inquiring minds wanna know is:
> > 
> > 1) Why is this a problem for LILO?
> 
> LILO is lame.

The 1024 cyliner limitation is a BIOS int13 limitation, you can't blame
LILO for it.  The whole PC hardware MBR int13 bootstrap process is a
patch on top of a hack on top of a poorly thought out implementation.
Foresight wasn't terribly prevalent back in the early IBM-PC days (of
course, I can't blame them for not envisioning personal computers with
450 MHz processors, a gigabyte of system memory, and multiple 9+ GB hard
drives).

> > 2) What should I do about it?

The best reference is the Large Disk mini-HOWTO by Andries Brouwer.
It's available on-line at "http://www.linuxhq.com/HOWTO/mini/Large-Disk.html".

The real fun is when you try to get multiple *BSD OS's, multiple Linux
OS's, and multiple Microsoft OS's on a single drive.  Doable, but not
for the faint of heart.

Regards,
-- 
Rex
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