problems with booting fedora core 4 ...

Anil Kumar Sharma xplusaks at gmail.com
Mon Nov 21 16:13:32 UTC 2005


It appears that U have been able to setup fedora.
1 Most probably U have STA drives. In that case U will have to very
carefully check bios settings on mother board. They may work with windows
but will need exact (correct) settings for fedora and particularly for grub
to work correctly.
2. If your drives are SCSI type then most likely U would not have faced any
problem with grub bcoz......that's another story.
3. please confirm your drives setup, may be with details as in bios.
 And lastly: On Win XP side, if U have 1.5 GB ram then U need not have any
pagefile (unless your job really requires it). Pagefile may actually
slowdown performance of XP with GB RAM.

 On 11/21/05, Mika Äijäläinen <mikeytheu at aim.com> wrote:
>
> OK ...
>
> this didn't work. I still get the same error message ...
>
> Here are my computer specs:
>
> AMD Athlon64 3700+ processor
> 1,5 GB DDR memory
> 2 x 160GB hard drives (Windows XP on disk 0, Fedora on disk 1)
> ATI Radeon 9550 graphics card
> don't know anything about my BIOS or motherboard ...
>
> Partitions:
>
> Windows XP on drive C (the whole disk, file system is NTFS)
> Linux: /dev/hdb1 is the /boot thing ... 8025M (1023 cylinders)
> /dev/hdb2 is the rest ... I don't know more ...
>
> and my Windows XP is an OEM ...
>
> and this is copied from the "System Information" tool in Windows XP:
>
> OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
> Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
> OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
> System Name SN046500220011
> System Manufacturer Packard Bell NEC
> System Model 00000000000000000000000
> System Type X86-based PC
> Processor x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 10 AuthenticAMD ~2400 Mhz
> BIOS Version/Date Award Software International, Inc. 4.0h, 12.6.2005
> SMBIOS Version 2.3
> Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
> System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32
> Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
> Locale United Kingdom
> Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.2180
> (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)"
> User Name SN046500220011\Mikey A
> Time Zone FLE Standard Time
> Total Physical Memory 1 536,00 MB
> Available Physical Memory 1,10 GB
> Total Virtual Memory 2,00 GB
> Available Virtual Memory 1,96 GB
> Page File Space 2,85 GB
> Page File C:\pagefile.sys
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Niemi" <drn_temp2 at rogers.com>
> To: "For users of Fedora Core releases" <fedora-list at redhat.com>
> Sent: Sunday, November 20, 2005 11:24 PM
> Subject: Re: problems with booting fedora core 4 ...
>
>
> 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.
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>



--
Anil Kumar Shrama
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20051121/15729fa3/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the fedora-list mailing list