Re: Hitting cylinder limit with GRUB

[Glenn Becker]

Christoph,

I made it work, but I do not know precisely how. GRUB never seemed to do
the trick for me (probably my fault - see Okuji's notes). Although LILO
had been booting systems from above 8G on this machine for over a year,
GRUB was reporting that both my Win98 partition and my FreeBSD partition
were inaccessible because they were 'beyond the cylinder limit imposed
by the BIOS.'

Perhaps impatiently, on New Year's Day, I inserted a Win98 SE CD into my
laptop and installed, assuming it would install to the 'front' of the
drive and wipe out my Linux installation, which I would then re-install
further in.

To my surprise, however, when I finished installing and used the Windows
'drivespace' utility to see how much space was reported for C:, the
value matched what I had set aside for Windows smack in the middle of
the drive! I used a Slackware rescue diskette to try booting into my
Linux system and lo! it was still there, unharmed. So was the FreeBSD
install. So from Linux I edited /etc/lilo.conf and reinstalled LILO.
Once that was done I had a triple-boot laptop ...though admittedly, an
old one with a 200mHz processor and 64MB of RAM. :)

Of course, since I am not really sure why this worked, YMMV.

Happy 2003,

Glenn

On Sun, 2003-01-05 at 13:17, Christoph Plattner wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> a general question !
> 
> Is Windows 98 able to boot from such a high cylinder number ?
> 
> Let's say, GRUB is dealing this correct and boots the Windows/DOS
> boot block from drive /dev/hda3. Then thins Win/Dos boot code
> includes a loader code to boot futher parts of windows. Is it
> possible to install Win98 above the 8GB without any problems
> (independent of the initial boot loader (in our case GRUB)) ?
> 
> Good new year 2003 !
> 
> Christoph
> 
> 
> Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
> > At 29 Dec 2002 18:28:32 -0500,
> > Glenn Becker wrote:
> > 
> >>Linux boots fine now from GRUB, I have the 'menu.lst' file in the right
> >>place, but GRUB seems unable to deal with anything above the 'cylinder
> >>limit' (it's not specifying but I assume the 1024 cylinder limit). I've
> >>been booting things from above there for over a year using LILO. I tried
> >>re-installing GRUB using grub-install --force-lba. Same result.
> > 
> > 
> > What does the command "geometry" say? Please run the command with your
> > drive specified (i.e. "geometry (hd0)") in the native environment (not
> > the grub shell)? Maybe you need to have a GRUB boot floppy to test it.
> > 
> > Also, recheck your BIOS setting. If your BIOS really supports LBA, it
> > should have a setting about your drive.
> > 
> > Okuji
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Bug-grub mailing list
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> > http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> 
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