lilo and L 01 01 01 01 on older pc with 30GB hard disk

I'm having trouble installing slackware 10.2 on an old IBM Pentium Pro PC with a 30GB maxtor. The old bios only sees 8G, so the previous user had installed maxtor's maxblast/EZ-Bios for use with windoze. EZ-bios caused problems with lilo after a slack install (IIRC, something like "keyboard translation table not found"), so I used the maxblast floppy to remove the ez-bios. I then repartitioned (1 large linux, 1 smaller swap) and reinstalled a bare minimum slack (lilo in mbr on /dev/hda), but when I try to boot from /dev/hda1 (swap is on /dev/hda2) I get the "L 01 01 01 01" error. After reading the lilo docs and many usenet posts, I tried numerous lilo options (lba32, fix-table, ignore-table, specifying the geometry, etc.). Unfortunately, I still can't get the PC to boot from the hard drive. Using lilo's test option showed two volume id listings, one with a partition offset of 63 and the other with 0. I believe lilo always picked the offset of 63. I tried specifying the geometry using each value, with no luck. I even tried booting with a dos diskette and ran fdisk /mbr, but that didn't help either.

If I use the slackware linux rescue disk, the PC boots and runs fine. This clue, probably contains the answer, but I'm just not sure what it is telling me.

Any ideas on how to make this hardware combo work without using the boot floppy is appreciated. Is the answer that I need to create a small (less than 8GB, within the 1024 cylinder limit) /boot partition? If so, I was under the impression that the version of lilo (22.5.9) in slackware 10.2 gets around this bios limitation - but I could be wrong.

Thank you for your help,

Peter
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