Re: BIOS 1024 Cylinder Limit

august105@xxxxxxxxx writes:

Hello,

I have this fairly large disk with Win XP and Mepis dual booted using
Grub boot loader. Today I attempted to install Kubuntu to make a
triple boot system,I have about 40GB unused space that I wanted to
install Kubutu on, the installer tells me it is unusable, so I fired up
PM 8 and got the following results.

How old is your computer. Almost all computer bioses no longer have any
such limit, but if you computer is more than 5 years old, it may have a
problem. Linux itself has absolutely no problem, but the bios may and Linux
HAS to depend on the bios to load the original kernel. This means that you
must have the partition containing the /boot directory in a place where the
bios can get at it. Ie, if your old bios can only address 1024 sectors then
the partition containing /boot must lie within that address space.
Thus, you could generate a partition ( say with 10MB of space) which you
will use as the /boot partition and place it below the 1024 cyl limit. That
is all you need.

But I am really surprized that your bios cannot boot from larger disks.


Disk 1 114470 mb
C: 50,007 mb ntfs Active Primary used 19,930.2
* Extended 4000.6 used 4000.6 Primary
FAT 32 4000.5 used 126.2 Logical
Local Disk Linux ext3 15359 used 5338 Primary
Swap Linux ext3 509.9 used 24.1
Unallocated 44594.5 Primary

This is when I got the 1024 cylinder limit message, I have never
encountered anything like this before. Is there some way I can use
that unallocated space? PM talked about resizing partitions but I don't
see how that would give me enough space for another os, however, it did

All you need is enough room for a /boot partition. Everything else can be
whereever you want.

not mention anything about resizing the XP partition. Thanks for any
help.

HOwevr, I would really like to know what the exact message you got from
Kubuntu. I still have real problems believing your machine is that old and
its bios does not support larger disk booting.


.

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