This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
A hint about AMI BIOS suckage: Subject: Re: 17.2Gb IDE Drive not auto supported under RH5.2? From: Eric Lee Green <eric@linux-hw.com> Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 12:21:47 -0500 (EST) On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Matthew J. Probst wrote: > First off... no, its not my bios... I have a AMI bios dated 29-Jan-99 > I have a Maxtor 91728D8 17.2Gig drive that I am trying to get to work > under Linux.. > > Of course I have no problem creating root and swap partitions under the > 8.2 gig limit. > > The actual (bios setting) CHS numbers for the drive=33483,16,63 > > RH5.2 (the 2.0.36 kernel) is getting LBA translated CHS of 1024,255,63. > > These numbers represent an 8.2 gig drive... > > when I boot with a 2.2.3 kernel, it gets translated CHS=2100,255,63 > Which translates properly to 17.2 Gig, but when I for the 2.0.26 kernel to > these params (with "hda=2100,255,63" on boot line), it hits all sorts of > ide sector seek errors near the end of the drive. It sounds like you are not passing correct hda= figures to the kernel. In the BIOS setup, what LBA numbers are reported? Whoops, you have an AMI BIOS, it doesn't tell you :-(. That's why I like the Award BIOS. Well, one thing you can do is turn off the LBA support in the AMI BIOS, and just pass the (untranslated) CHS numbers on your hda= line to the Linux kernel. ======== Subject: RE: Super-Colossal Crash (OT portion) From: "Juha Saarinen" <juha_saarinen@email.msn.com> Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 16:32:06 +1200 I shouldn't reply and keep this senseless thread alive, but... if what you say is true, Linux is a shell to Lilo, because that is what the BIOS boots into. In simple terms, your computer's BIOS looks for IO.SYS in the root directory of your active boot-up drive... IO.SYS is actually a whole operating system, it's real-mode DOS. IO.SYS checks if Config.sys and Autoexec.bat are there; if they are, it loads the command interpreter (COMMAND.COM) and executes the real-mode DOS commands in those files. Note that you don't need to have either config.sys or autoexec.bat for Windows 9x to function -- IO.SYS loads the necessary DOS real-mode drivers such as himem.sys, ifshlp.sys, setver.exe and dblspace.bin or drvspace.bin for compressed hard disks for the boot up process to continue. IO.SYS also reads MSDOS.SYS which contains settings for a number of low-level DOS functions like whether or not to use double-buffering for SCSI drives etc. Then, win.com is executed to load the core Win9x components, which include vmm32.vxd that is in fact a number of static VxDs combined -- the exact composition depends on your computer's configuration. Now, IO.SYS is no longer used to start win9x. The loading of the static VxDs is determined by the Registry and System.ini. We're still in real mode here, but once all the static VxDs have been loaded, VMM32.VXD switches your CPU into protected mode, and the protected-mode components of the operating system are loaded, such as KERNEL32.DLL, GDI/GDI32.EXE, USER/USER32.EXE and so forth. You're now running a somewhat crash-prone 32-bit protected-mode operating system with pre-emptive multitasking of Win32 apps (16-bit apps are run in Virtual DOS machines, that don't understand preemptive multitasking). The Windows 9x shell or GUI is started last and DOS is not used for anything by Windows 9x. What's important here is that it would have been entirely possible for Microsoft not to use real-mode DOS to get Win9x going, but they wanted to preserve backward compatibility... sigh. I'm writing this from memory, so I might have got a few things wrong but I hope it illustrates that things aren't quite as simple as they seem. I can't remember for sure, but I believe all x86 machines are booted up in real-mode by BIOS, and then the CPU is switched into protected-mode by the operating system. -- Juha > -----Original Message----- > From: Statux [mailto:statux@bigfoot.com] > Sent: Thursday, 25 March 1999 12:04 > To: redhat-list@redhat.com > Subject: Re: Super-Colossal Crash (OT portion) > > > Windows 9x is started through MSDOS 7. remember win.com? You can have an > MSDOS 7 system without 9x anything. You never deal with it, but there is > something on the system that run win.com, thus putting it into > conventional > memory. Then win.com boots the rest of the shell (the 9x shell). > > DOS is what is being booted when the bootsector is read. Windows 9x is > executed from DOS. > > Remember, this only goes for 9x, and not NT (which is actually an > OS because > it's not executed from another shell) > > OSs are what get booted when the system starts. Autoexec.bat and > Config.sys > are parsed by MSDOS 7 at startup, long before the 9x shell is > ever started. > COMMAND.COM is the DOS shell.. for those who don't know. > > ===== Subject: Re: Super-Colossal Crash (OT portion) From: Ken Witherow <phantoml@frontiernet.net> Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 01:36:44 -0500 Juha Saarinen wrote: > > I shouldn't reply and keep this senseless thread alive, but... if what you > say is true, Linux is a shell to Lilo, because that is what the BIOS boots > into. > > In simple terms, your computer's BIOS looks for IO.SYS in the root directory > of your active boot-up drive... IO.SYS is actually a whole operating system, This is actually slightly wrong. The BIOS looks for the bootable driver and reads the boot sector off that drive. The dos loader then tells the computer what file to use as the kernel(IO.SYS). That then takes over and loads MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM. Is dos then not an operating system because it too has a loader? All lilo is is that part that tells the computer where to look for the OS. === Subject: RE: Super-Colossal Crash (OT portion) From: "Juha Saarinen" <juha_saarinen@email.msn.com> Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 09:13:49 +1200 > This is actually slightly wrong. The BIOS looks for the bootable driver > and reads the boot sector off that drive. The dos loader then tells the > computer what file to use as the kernel(IO.SYS). That then takes over > and loads MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM. Is dos then not an operating system > because it too has a loader? All lilo is is that part that tells the > computer where to look for the OS. Hmmm... MSDOS.SYS is just a text file with a few settings to override IO.SYS defaults in Win9x... and I thought loading COMMAND.COM depended on whether or not you have any real-mode stuff in Autoexec.bat etc. Anyway, thanks for the correction.