Hi all! I have a 20 GB HD and used to have windows on it. I partitioned the HD using FIPS so that 10 GB is for windoze and 10 GB for linux. fips ran successfully. linux installation was a success but when i rebooted the machine, it directly went in windoze instead of asking me something at the lilo prompt. luckily i created the linux boot disk. so if i have to boot linux everytime, i hvae to do that using the boot disk.. now that sucks when i tried to install lilo myself in the mbr it gave following error: [root@avionics /root]# /sbin/lilo -v LILO version 21.4-4...... 'lba32' extension copyright..... Reading boot sector /dev/hda Merging with /boot/boot.b warning: device 0x0302 exceeds 1024 cylinder limit Fatal: sector 20191878 too large for linear mode ( try 'lba32' instead ) I don't kno wwhy this is happening. can anybody help me out with this please? thanks Nilesh ps: i have win98 with me.

at a guess, this is due to your system configuration. is your system old or the motherboard old. if so you need to create the boot partition for linux under the 1024 cyl limit, ie below 2GB. i have an old board and simply have c:\ for win of 1.6GB then linux boot followed by D:\ for win of 6GB. then followed by linux root and swap. once the boot partition is below the 2GB boundary lilo will kick in for you and give you the lilo screen at boot-up to choose either linux or 98(it calls 98 dos, you can change it or live with it)

add the parameter lba32 in your /etc/lilo.conf and rerun lilo you possibly need to specify to bios to use lba

Nilesh, On my HDs the 1024 cylinder is around 8 gigs. If you make your Win, partition 7.5 gigs and put your /boot partition next then LILO will work fine. Or at least it does on my 8, 10, & 20 Gig HDs. But now I did cut Windows down to 1 - 2 gigs because I hardly ever use it any more. And a smaller partition will increase windows speed because the FAT (file allocation table) is smaller and doesn't have to look over a big FAT to find the addresses for all the files. tom

I just wrote a website concerning the lba32 error and problems with dual booting. I had been trying to dual boot red hat 7 and win98 for about two months but just recently i was succesful. The only thing i could recommend is for you do download the self extracting exe called loadlin. this software allows you to boot linux from you c:\ but you need to place a copy of the file VMLINUZ to the c:\ from your floppy. this worked for me and now i dont need some stupid floppy disk that takes like 10 mins to boot from. check out my instructions at http://joefriedel.tripod.com/dualbootit.htm l you will find a copy of the self extractor off of a link there. If you do it the way i show in my page you dont have to worry about your MBR. MY WAY IS THE EASIEST BELIVE ME> You will have to modify config.sys and autoexec.bat i cant stress this enough folks make a boot disk from windows and make sure you back up your current autoexec.bat and config.sys to a floppy. I thought it would cause my computer to lag because i thought LOADLIN would leave the windows os in memory but it doesnt appear to do that in fact it appears that the computer likes linux more now that it has been booted from the HD and not a floppy. NO MORE LBA32 ERRORS EVER!!!