Thanks for the reply but after many headaches I figured it out.
I forgot that ide encryption devices were installed on this motherboard. The system bios initialized them by default, where as LinuxBIOS did not. So LinuxBIOS tried to read an encrypted drive without decrypting it, obviously it was going to read junk data. After disabling this in the system bios and reinstalling CentOS filo can read the partition.
Jon
On 12/8/06, Ben Hewson ben@hewson-venieri.com wrote:
Jon Dufresne wrote:
I am trying to boot a successfully system using LinuxBIOS + filo payload. Right now I can currently get to filo. I Can mostly boot off a livecd, but dies eventually because my root isn't specified correctly. Instead of messing with the CD boot (since my system will boot from a HD eventually anyway) I decided to install a minimal centos system on a spare hard drive. I partitioned the hard drive as follows:
# fdisk -l /dev/hda
Disk /dev/hda: 3166 MB, 3166765056 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 385 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 287 2305296 83 Linux /dev/hda2 288 385 787185 82 Linux swap
hda1 is formatted as ext2. When I get to filo I type the command to boot the kernel and I get some sort of partition error on hda1, here is the output:
boot: hda1:/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-42.EL console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200 malloc_diag: alloc: 408 bytes (5 blocks), free: 15968 bytes (1 blocks) malloc_diag: alloc: 424 bytes (6 blocks), free: 15952 bytes (1 blocks) file_open: dev=hda1, path=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-42.EL find_ide_controller: found PCI IDE controller 8086:24cb prog_if=0x8a find_ide_controller: primary channel: compatibility mode find_ide_controller: cmd_base=0x1f0 ctrl_base=0x3f4 ide_software_reset: Waiting for ide0 to become ready for reset... ok init_drive: Testing for hda init_drive: Probing for hda init_drive: LBA mode, sectors=6185088 init_drive: Init device params... ok hda: LBA 3166MB: WDC AC33100H init_drive: Testing for hdb init_drive: Testing for hdb open_pc_partition: pc partition magic number not found open_eltorito_image: No El-Torito signature Unrecognized partitioning scheme malloc_diag: alloc: 408 bytes (5 blocks), free: 15968 bytes (1 blocks) malloc_diag: alloc: 328 bytes (4 blocks), free: 16048 bytes (1 blocks)
Now, can boot this fine with the system bios using grub so I don't think my partition is corrupted. Do I need to do a special partition in order to boot with filo? I think my ide controller is configured fine because I can boot off the CD. Just in case it wasn't I attempted to fill registers with values from a working boot with lspci, same error.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks, Jon
Ok just the obvious, have you enabled the relevant options in the filo Config file ?