Arch Linux

Cotton

Member

From: Cornwall, UK

Registered: 2004-09-17

Posts: 568

Grub problem

I've just replaced a 7 G drive with a 160 G drive in LBA mode and installed  GRUB onto it to boot Arch. 

When rebooting it says Error 18, Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS.

Presumably, I need a small /boot partition (at the beginning?) of the drive to enable the rest of the disk to be seen?

I thought that this was a problem that LILO used to have, which is why I switched to GRUB.

Or am I doing something wrong?

skoal

Member

From: Frequent Flyer Underworld

Registered: 2004-03-23

Posts: 612

Website

Re: Grub problem

Well, once the grub bootloader starts up it can access your entire drive (although the BIOS may not be able to past 8GB).  However, I think the bootloader still needs to know where to find the "stage" files.  If those files are past 8GB, I don't believe the bootloader can finish starting up properly.  That's my best guess.  I always use a <30 GB /boot on part1 anyway, so have never worried about this issue...

T-Dawg

Forum Fellow

From: Charlotte, NC

Registered: 2005-01-29

Posts: 2,736

Re: Grub problem

Error 18, Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS.

Your MBR does not have the correct information on it. I dont know what LBA mode is but after any change to the location of the boot partion, the partition table on the MBR needs to be rewritten. If not your bios looks to the previous MBR,  reads its info on where the boot partion is and tries to pass control over to it. If the MBR sees a different size on it then what it has recorded, then it gives you this error. I dont know how to explain it very well but unless your bios doesn't support such large drives, I'm pretty sure this is the problem.

On my 120 gig I have 40+ gigs on part one followed by 33 megs for the boot partion.

your probably going to have to reinstall it and select the 'write option' in cfdisk then possibly reboot. Boot sector virus must be disabled to do so.