Re: Alternative booting

OK, but isn't the only limit in regard to the BIOS the 1024 cylinder
limit? Someone pointed out that this is roughly 8G. Since I always
booted off a partition that was past the 30G mark it doesn't strike me
as if there is a BIOS issue....unless someone digs up yet another mark
that may play a role. So if it is a BIOS 1024 cylinder issue it ought to
have never worked.

There are two normal limits - 1024 cylinders, which is rarely a problem
on newer boxes and often not older ones (a good guide is that this is
generally fixed by the EDD extensions to the BIOS which are the same ones
that give a BIOS standard "boot order" settings for disks, so if you can
boot off drive C, D, E, ... its probably not got this limit)

The second limit you sometimes hit in the BIOS nowdays is around 32GB and
is caused by older BIOSes being confused by the larger LBA disks. The
disk lies to the BIOS that it is 32GB in size and the boot area must all
be below 32GB. The OS (Linux, Windows, ...) once booted doesn't use the
BIOS services and tells the disk to stop lying about its size. Its a
jumper on some disks but not one thats likely to be a problem unless you
set that jumper yourself.

GRUB is used by just about every Linux OS (and most other non-Windows OS
on the planet) on all PC type systems 32 or 64bit. Its pretty reliable
unless wrongly configured.

Your comments about the raid are wrong also btw. For software fake RAID
(most RAID today) you usually can't boot from a RAID volume directly. For
RAID1 the system normally boots by putting the boot data on the first
disk of the RAID (or optionally onto both). The BIOS will only load from
the boot volume so this works fine. If you've got BIOS fakeraid doing
RAID0 or RAID0+1 striping then it all gets extremely ugly. In that case
the preferable approach is to use the Linux raid formats directly not the
BIOS ones. That can be a pain if you've got mixed Windows/Linux on one
disk.


Alan

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