However, lilo is (or can be) notoriously difficult to set up with some hardware. This is not really the fault of lilo's authors, nor of linux. It is the failure of OEMs to agree upon and follow some more universal standards than merely those needed to get by with Microsoft operating systems. Because the BIOS is written to work hand in hand with Windows, not Linux, lilo sometimes has to make guesses. And sometimes those guesses aren't right. There are overrides to cover virtually everything, but unless you know in advance that they are needed for your hardware, you end up doing a lot of poking around to get it right.
I agree, this is not user friendly. Newer hardware is usually a lot more cooperative. But the "old" (as in more than 5 years ago) stuff can be a PITA. I know this, having installed Linux on a number of Compaq machines. It always works eventually...
It sounds like you're hitting a cylinder boundary limitation because this distro is partitioning the hard drive differently from other distros. This is usually worked around by having a small /boot partition at the beginning of the disk.
Actually, I think it's that the installer didn't copy the necessary initrd to the hard disk. So far, our efforts to get the thing running have assumed the initrd wasn't necessary. I now believe that it is, and copying it from the CD to the hard disk, then telling lilo to point the kernel at it, will fix the problem.
After fiddling around more and getting things almost working, it couldn't mount its own drive as it couldn't handle the ext3 filesystem it put there. After a bit fiddling about, we ran into the wall that is the need for dpkg. I then repartitioned the disk and made a small boot partition and tried another install. That one skipped all the other fiddling about but ran slam into the same wall. Ah well.
After hearing that you and jmaynard weren't using an initrd, it's most likely the ext3 module necessary to mount the (root?) filesystem(s) on the hard drive is in that initrd image. Telling lilo about the initrd (and restoring the initrd from the CD, if necessary) should fix it.
Most initrds I've seen are ext2 or compressed ext2, but the most recent ones seem to be compressed ROM fs. Either way, and once you get rid of the gzip compression if your initrd is ext2, you should be able to mount the initrd via a loop device.
However, lilo is (or can be) notoriously difficult to set up with some hardware. This is not really the fault of lilo's authors, nor of linux. It is the failure of OEMs to agree upon and follow some more universal standards than merely those needed to get by with Microsoft operating systems. Because the BIOS is written to work hand in hand with Windows, not Linux, lilo sometimes has to make guesses. And sometimes those guesses aren't right. There are overrides to cover virtually everything, but unless you know in advance that they are needed for your hardware, you end up doing a lot of poking around to get it right.
I agree, this is not user friendly. Newer hardware is usually a lot more cooperative. But the "old" (as in more than 5 years ago) stuff can be a PITA. I know this, having installed Linux on a number of Compaq machines. It always works eventually...
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I'm not ready to blame the hardware, having had no trouble with other distributions getting lilo installed on it.
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After fiddling around more and getting things almost working, it couldn't mount its own drive as it couldn't handle the ext3 filesystem it put there. After a bit fiddling about, we ran into the wall that is the need for dpkg. I then repartitioned the disk and made a small boot partition and tried another install. That one skipped all the other fiddling about but ran slam into the same wall. Ah well.
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We tried rebuilding the initrd from the stuff on the hard disk, but mkinitrd wanted to dpkg install something, and the dpkg infrastructure isn't here.
Is there a way to mount (probably via loopback) the initrd and see what's in it?
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