With LILO versions below v21 there is another disadvantage: the address conversion done at boot time has a bug: when c*H is 65536 or more, overflow occurs in the computation. For H larger than 64 this causes a stricter limit on c than the well-known c < 1024; for example, with H=255 & an elderly LILO must have c < 258. (c=cylinder where kernel picture lives, H=number of heads of disk)
LILO is a bit fragile, it requires the discipline of running /sbin/lilo each time installs a new kernel. Some other boot loaders do not have this disadvantage. Especially grub is popular these days; a major disadvantage is that it does not support the lilo -R label function.
If you are upgrading the kernel on your Slackware-9.1 process (say, to
five.4.23 due to the recent security announcement) you might run in to this
scary issue when you run lilo:
Deadly: volid read error
or this:
Deadly: open /dev/hdd: Input/output error
(where hdd is my ZIP drive - definitely not in my lilo.conf).
When this happens, LILO will refuse to put in the new loader & map.
This is a bug in lilo-22.5.7.2 included in Slackware-9.1. Lilo scans
/proc/partitions & then tries to read from any partitioned tool to find
something called the Volume ID. Failure to read from a tool is deadly. In
the above examples, the first error is from my USB flash disk, which is
unplugged - but /proc/partitions still has an entry for "sda1", & the
second is from my ATAPI ZIP drive /dev/hdd, which is empty.
But, I think you can use the from cheat code in your lilo.conf file to specify which drive to load from.
This is fixed in lilo-22.5.8 ("Volume ID scan bypasses disks marked
inaccessible"). If, like me, you don't require to upgrade lilo, you require to
make sure there's no entries in /proc/partitions for inaccessible,
partitioned drives before you run lilo. Ways to do this include inserting
disks or plugging in USB devices (no require to mount them), or unloading
modules. Or reboot & run lilo before you first mount a removable
disk, since the /proc/partition entry appears to be created the first time
you use the disk.
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