Lilo: "L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99″

I compiled a 2.6.16.2 kernel a while ago, and finally got around to rebooting into it. My hd config was insane so I feared rebooting - and apparently rightly so. Anyhow, I got the following unpleasant error from LILO (analogously from grub, by the way):

L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 ...
The docs say that lilo can't access its map file, probably because of drive geometry mismatch. Noone on the net suggested this, but in /etc/lilo.conf, changing the line lba32 to linear did the trick. It generated a bunch of warnings about how linear is old and sucks, but it may just be that my hard drive and/or motherboard are also old, and suck.

Another issue I then faced was the lack of devfs, and I don't have udev set up (I have no idea what this even involves) and my static dev directory was all permissioned wrong and I wasn't sure what permissions are ”supposed” to be on PTYs and TTYs, or even the real difference between them. Once I have time to do more than a naive chmodding, I may or may not have a useful udev entry.

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