I have a compaq presario 721UK and can't get linux to run on it, basically i have a partition setup as follows;

3Gb NTFS WinXP Primary Partition
17Gb Extended Parition Includes
{
5Gb Ext2 Linux Partition (Tried Ext3 also)
500Mb Swap Partition
11.5Gb Fat32 App & Backup Partition (Needed)
}

i want to be able to dual boot, XP with Linux, it follows the insallation nicely but "Slackware" halts at "LILO" when i get ready to run it for the first time, well not even that, all i get is "LI" but no "LO", i have seen this before on my desktop machine, but that was related to my RAID controller, i could only boot off the IDE controller where i installed Linux due to the HDD and partition references that "LILO" stores.

but as you know, with a laptop you can't swap HDD's between different IDE controllers.

Even Mandrake 8.1 gets past "LILO" but magically resets at the same point during boot up.

Any one got some ideas?

Your BIOS does not appear to have LBA enabled.

Try installing grub instead as grub does not have issues with big disks (disks with more than 1024 cylinders).

Bert

me too

i just installed slack 8.1 dual boot with lilo. did u copy the correct boot ssector into windows?

the command:

mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy

followed by:

dd if=/dev/hda6 bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/floppy/linux.bin

seems to yield no result as it did in slackware 8.0. anyideas on this one?

Can you post your /etc/lilo.conf file.

also at the begenning of the file add this line lba32 this should fix the problem of 1024 cylinders.

i fixed it

Well, what was the answer? C'mon we're all noobs here!

Bert

i duno really-i just tried copying the boot sector again and it worked! adding lba32 by itself did nothing but i kept it there.