Re: [SLE] Grub and BIOS limitations

On Monday 18 September 2006 12:02 am, Felix Miata wrote:
On 06/09/17 23:19 (GMT-0400) Paul Abrahams apparently typed:
I think the weird grub behavior I've encountered really is related to
BIOS limitations. Following the instructions in the grub manual, I built
a boot diskette and booted from it, getting a grub prompt. I then issued
the following commands, with these responses:

root (hd0,7)
Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

The >128G HD size makes this sound like a geometry mismatch problem,
even as new as the motherboard and BIOS are. Because it used to work, I
suspect no one's going to figure out how it got broken, but I'll bet
starting from scratch with a disk wipe and putting a /boot or / and Grub
on the first cylinder would fix it permanently.

I'm reluctantly reaching the conclusion that I have to start the installation
all over again, possibly even the Windows part. But I just might be able to
get away with rearranging the Linux partitions to put the boot partition
ahead of the root partition, since the boot partition is the one that grub
needs to work with.


In spite of all the recomendations you'll find elsewhere to install
windoz first at the start of the drive, I've found there is no problem
installing windoz anywhere you please as long as you provide it a first
disk FAT primary of about 40M (yes M, not G) or more to boot (and
install) from. I normally install XP on hda8 or higher (D:), after
logical Linux partitions beginning at hda5. I always do all my
partitioning prior to beginning any OS installation.

root (hd0,6)
Filesystem type is Reiserfs, partition type is 0x83

root (hd0,7)
Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type is 0x83

I then issued the root (hd0,7) command repeatedly and about half the time
I got the Error 18 and about half the time I got the filesystem type.

As I mentioned earlier, my hard drive is a 200GB model and my motherboard
is a Biostar P4M800-M7A, with an Award Bios v6.00PG. I'm now trying to
update the BIOS, but I still don't know where to get information about
the capacity of the current BIOS. I cannot find it anywhere in the BIOS
configuration utility.

Is 10.0 the only Linux you ever installed on this system? Did the system
come with XP already installed on the 200G HD?

Yes, 10.0 is the only Linux I've installed. XP was not preinstalled, but I
installed it myself.

Paul

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