Grub

[Les Mikesell]

Karl Larsen wrote:

>    Hi Marko, your English is perfect. I just did something that was 
> interesting but I do not understand why. Using Grub I put it in the MBR 
> of the Slave hard drive (hd1) and removed the Master hard drive (hd0) 
> and rebooted. The system booted with just one hard drive but it wrote 
> this on the screen:
> 
> Booting F7
> 
> Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

Finally! An actual error message instead of guessing about why the sky 
is falling and what might make it stop.

> 
> Press any key
> 
>    I have no idea why this was printed but it does indicate some maximum 
> has been exceeded in BIOS.

It is pretty explicit. Grub is asking bios to get a sector beyond the 
range supported by your bios.

>    I should get a bare bones new computer this week from TigerTronics 
> which will have I hope a much newer BIOS that knows about 1 terribyte 
> hard drives :-)
> 
>    This might fix Grub.

Grub isn't broken, and you don't really need new hardware.  You just 
need to make sure that the files needed during boot are within the 1st 
1024 cylinders on the drive which is easy to arrange by making a small 
/boot partition on the first part of the drive. I think that happens by 
default if you let the installer do the partitioning.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com