problems with booting fedora core 4 ...

[David Niemi]

On Sun, 2005-11-20 at 21:35 +0200, Mika Äijäläinen wrote:
> Hi there!
> 
> I have a dual boot system, Windows Xp and Fedora Core 4 ... but have a 
> little problem ... how to boot Fedora properly? I tried to configure the 
> boot settings with Wingrub, but it doesn't work ... when I try to boot 
> Fedora, I get a message "erroro 18: cannot mount the selected partition" ... 
> and the partition was the right one ...
> 
> So, any other ways to make a dual boot system ... ?

Here is what the error is:

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS
This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block
address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area. This generally
happens if your disk is larger than the BIOS can handle (512MB for
(E)IDE disks on older machines or larger than 8GB on others.). In more
practical terms this means the BIOS is unable to start executing the
kernel because the kernel is not located within the block it can access
at boot up time.

This can be circumvented by creating a boot partition at the beginning
of the disk that is completely within the first 1023 cylinders of the
harddrive. This partition will contain the kernel. 

The kernel it self does not suffer from the same limitations as the BIOS
so after the BIOS has loaded the kernel the kernel will have no problem
accessing the whole harddrive. Newer BIOSes will automatically translate
the harddrives size in a way that it can be completely contained within
the first 1023 cylinders and hence modern computers do not suffer from
this problem. 
The same error can happen when the BIOS detects a disk in a different
way as Linux does. This can happen when changing motherboards or when
moving a GRUB-bootable disk from one computer to another. If this
happens, just boot with a GRUB floppy, read the C/H/S numbers from the
existing partition table and manually edit the BIOS numbers to match. If
using a SUSE linux and installing on VM Ware this problem is solved by
creating a small partition at the very beginning of the harddisc, and
mounting it as /boot.
*************************

As for WinGRUB I've no experience with it but here is the link to the
home page to help solve problems.
http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/
The error explanations are there and it looks like the same in all
versions of GRUB.

Without more information on the hardware, partitions and the setup it is
difficult to offer suggestions.