Red Hat LINUX ES 2.1 -, Installation Manual

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Appendix D. An Introduction to Disk Partitions 91
On First Two IDE Drives
If you have 2 IDE (or EIDE) drives,
/boot
must be located on one of them. Note that this two-
drive limit also includes any IDE CD-ROM drives on your primary IDE controller. So, if you
have one IDE hard drive, and one IDE CD-ROM on your primary controller,
/boot
must be
located on the first hard drive only , even if you have other hard drives on your secondary IDE
controller.
On First IDE or First SCSI Drive
If you have one IDE (or EIDE) drive and one or more SCSI drives,
/boot
must be located either
on the IDE drive or the SCSI drive at ID 0. No other SCSI IDs will work.
On First Two SCSI Drives
If you have only SCSI hard drives,
/boot
must be located on a drive at ID 0 or ID 1. No other
SCSI IDs will work.
Partition Completely Below Cylinder 1023
No matter which of the above configurations apply, the partition that holds
/boot
must be located
entirely below cylinder 1023. If the partition holding
/boot
straddles cylinder 1023, you may
face a situation where GRUB and LILO will work initially (because all the necessary information
is below cylinder 1023) but will fail if a new kernel is to be loaded and that kernel resides above
cylinder 1023.
As mentioned earlier, it is possible that some of the newer BIOSes may permit GRUB and LILO to
work with configurations that do not meet these guidelines. Likewise, some of GRUB and LILO’s
more esoteric features may be used to get a Linux system started, even if the configuration does not
meet our guidelines. However, due to the number of variables involved, Red Hat cannot support such
efforts.
Note
Disk Druid
, as well as the Server installation, takes these BIOS-related limitations into account.