[NTLUG:Discuss] Boot Partition Too Big?

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, 03 Dec 2000 19:40:20 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Dennis Myhand <1dmm9671 at unixstew.tstc.edu>  said:
> I have had to redo things here in Waco and I have been trying to get my
> Linux installed on hlaf of a 15.3 gig drive.  When I try to install
> Redhat 6.2 I get the message in disk druid that the boot partition is
> too large and I can't go any further.  When I try SuSE 6.3, everything
> seems to load fine, but when I boot (either from LILO or a boot disk) I
> get the kernel panic error and there is no image found.  Anyone know how
> I can get around either of these problems?  Thanks, Dennis in Waco

I would have expected this to be an issue relating to the combination of
LILO + Motherboard BIOS.

The crux of the problem is that at the initial time of boot, you need
for the kernel to be found in a feasible location, and, with older
BIOSes, it may well be that, initially, your BIOS will only be able to
recognize partitions of fairly limited size. [520MB rings a bell...]

What you may need to do is to create a Pretty Small Partition, perhaps
only a few hundred MB in size, on which the boot kernel resides.  It
is not uncommon to mount this small partition as /boot, and have it 
normally mounted read-only.
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