'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

Bahdom · 2009-03-20 02:51:47

Hi,

I have a SATA hard drive with 3 primary partitions, the first 2 are OS (windows and linux accordingly) and both are about 35GB each. My motherboard is a Gigabyte M61PME-S2P.

GRUB won't get past 1.5 (error #17) unless I set the BIOS to read the SATA drive in 'Large Hard Drive' mode. However, if I leave LHD on Windows won't boot. If I remove LHD mode and reset the MBR for windows then Windows will boot properly.

Is there some way of making them both work?

Thanks

Ranguvar · 2009-03-20 21:25:11

I'm guessing LHD allows the BIOS to boot MBRs past the limit (forgot what it is specifically).

This would make sense if your first partition is Windows. Without LHD, the Windows boot loader goes (and boots Windows), because the BIOS can't see GRUB - it's past the limit. If that option's on, the BIOS sees and boots Grub.

The answer is to keep LHD on, and add a section to Grub (/boot/grub/menu.lst) that boots Windows - by default there already is one you can tweak. Or do you already have this, and you're saying Grub won't boot Windows with LHD on?

Bahdom · 2009-03-21 00:58:37

Yeah, the windows entry is there. In LHD mode the windows entry is printed on screen and the system hangs. On LHD without grub I get a 'error reading drive' error with the Windows booter.

Bahdom · 2009-03-31 04:05:18

bump

Bahdom · 2009-04-04 22:56:28

second bump

R00KIE · 2009-04-05 11:51:13

I guess you should have installed windows with LHD turned on, as far as I know windows is very picky about any changes you do to some system configurations, somehow it assumes the system will never change and will always try to boot with what was detected the first time.
Any modern OS should be able to handle large hard drives without any problem so it's safe to leave that option on, and as you are experiencing, it can cause more trouble than bring solutions to problems.
I guess the option is to reinstall windows with LHD turned on .... but thats a major pain appart from that .... the only option I see is to get some free space in the first 4096 cylinders (this should be the first 2GB of the disk) and put /boot there, then with LHD turned off the bios should be able to boot into grub but I don't know how things will go from there and if linux will boot properly ... most probably it will.

Bahdom · 2009-04-05 16:17:15

yeah, thats what i ended up doing. Oh well.

Thanks anyway =]

Arch Linux

#1 2009-03-20 02:51:47

'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

#2 2009-03-20 21:25:11

Re: 'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

#3 2009-03-21 00:58:37

Re: 'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

#4 2009-03-31 04:05:18

Re: 'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

#5 2009-04-04 22:56:28

Re: 'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

#6 2009-04-05 11:51:13

Re: 'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

#7 2009-04-05 16:17:15

Re: 'Large Hard Drive' mode and GRUB

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