When the system is booted, the BIOS reads sector 0 (known as the MBR - the Master Boot Record) from the first disk (or from floppy or CDROM), and jumps to the code found there - usually some bootstrap loader. These small bootstrap programs found there typically have no own disk drivers and use BIOS services. This means that a Linux kernel can only be booted when it is entirely located within the first 1024 cylinders.
This problem is very easily solved: make sure that the kernel (and perhaps other files used during bootup, such as LILO map files) are located on a partition that is entirely contained in the first 1024 cylinders of a disk that the BIOS can access - probably this means the first or second disk.
Thus: create a small partition, say 10 MB large, so that there
is room for a handful of kernels, making sure that it is entirely
contained within the first 1024 cylinders of the first or second
disk. Mount it on /boot so that LILO will put its stuff there.
Another point is that the boot loader and the BIOS must agree
as to the disk geometry. LILO asks the kernel for the geometry,
but more and more authors of disk drivers follow the bad habit
of deriving a geometry from the partition table, instead of
telling LILO what the BIOS will use. Thus, often the geometry
supplied by the kernel is worthless. In such cases it helps
to give LILO the `linear' option. The effect of this is that
LILO does not need geometry information at boot loader install
time (it stores linear addresses in the maps) but does the conversion
of linear addresses at boot time. Why is this not the default?
Well, there is one disadvantage: with the `linear' option, LILO
no longer knows about cylinder numbers, and hence cannot warn you
when part of the kernel was stored above the 1024 cylinder limit,
and you may end up with a system that does not boot.
Tim Williams writes: `I had my Linux partition within the first 1024 cylinders and still it wouldnt boot. First when I moved it below 1 GB did things work.' How can that be? Well, this was a SCSI disk with AHA2940UW controller which uses either H=64, S=32 (that is, cylinders of 1 MiB = 1.05 MB), or H=255, S=63 (that is, cylinders of 8.2 MB), depending on setup options in firmware and BIOS. No doubt the BIOS assumed the former, so that the 1024 cylinder limit was found at 1 GiB, while Linux used the latter and LILO thought that this limit was at 8.4 GB.