Alternative booting

[Chris Jones]

> So how come that on my brand new system this appears to be an issue? I
> use a SATA controller and I am convinced that there isn't a single
> native SATA drive of less than 8G capacity.

I agree one would hope on a new system it wouldn't be an issue.

> Also, my first partition is for XP and 30G, so if 8G is the magic limit
> then how come that GRUB booted fine several times with that setup?
> Again, I am very sure that I am not victim of any BIOS limitations, but
> that GRUB does one thing five times in a row as expected and just
> doesn't do it a sixth time around for reasons unknown.

Do you change anything (updates etc.) between the 5th and 6th boots ? If not, 
this is starting to sound like flaky hardware to me...

If you do, then what - If it is anything to do with grub/kernels I still 
maintain it sounds like you have part of your filesystems that are needed by 
grub, written to a part of your system grub cannot reach for whatever reason.

Chris