So, it all began, when I decided to move over to 2.6. I did the usual stuff, compile, modules_install etc, ran lilo, reboot, and then got L 99 99...

I've tried a couple of rescue discs, reran lilo about 50 times, tried lilo -M to reinstall boot loader, did install-mbr, too (i don't even know what that does), al this in different orders, but I always get the L 99 treatment when trying to boot. After running lilo under Knoppix, somehow the system would start to boot again.

According to the man, code 99 means LILO could not load the stage2 boot loader. So my guess is this:
I got a 160G drive, about 150 of which was used(all one 160G reiser). When I compiled the new kernel, the newly created bzImage file got positioned too far towards the end of the drive, and the boot loader could not access it.
I was thinking of a reinstall, and for that, I tried to backup my data to a 80G hard drive, and burning the rest to DVDs, and in the process, I deleted a LOT of files. After I finished deleting unnecessery stuff, and copying the rest to the 80G drive under Knoppix, I gave it another go, just for the heck of it. I copied the bzImage from the source dir to /boot, ran lilo, and tried rebooted. This was the point, where the sysem could boot and run again perfect. I guess with the massive deletions, lots of sectors were freed up closer to the beginning of the drive, so the newly copied /boot/bzImage was accessible again by the bootloader.

Since then, I downloaded/stored a lot of stuff, and the drive started filling up again, but I needed to go back to 2.4, so copied bzImage, ran lilo, reboot... L 99 since then.

I had a free 10G drive for test, copied all stuff needed to boot to it from the 10G, ran lilo on it, and the system works perfect.

So it seems lilo can't access sectors too far into the drive.

This is just a theory, I don't know, how lilo works. And since 8G< drives need to be accessed by LBA, a 20G drive should be able to be accessed the same way, as a 2 Terabyte one, and it shouldn't matter, where that particular file is located physically, once the drive, and the loader know LBA.

So to the actual questions:
- Does this sound sane? if yes,
- Is there a way to manipulate the physical location of a file? if no,
- Is there a safe way to move a 160G reiserfs partition, say, 5 Gigabytes higher, so that I can create a boot partitition in front of it? if no,
- Does anyone have any ideas about how to solve this, or what might be happening here?

Any ideas appreciated, also if someone could explain in detail, how 22. lilo works, step by step.

Thanks!

i didnt read what u wrote BUT i had the same problem so i just formatted the disk after backing up