Re: Hitting cylinder limit with GRUB

[Glenn Becker]

Hi,

> 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.

Here is what I get when I first run the command 'grub' in the native
environment (sorry - is that the "grub shell" or not?) and then the
command 'geometry (hd0)':

drive 0x80: C/H/S = 3648/255/63, The number of sectors = 58605110,
/dev/hda
  Partition num: 0, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
  Partition num: 1, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0x82
  Partition num: 2, Filesystem type unknown, partition type 0xc
  Partition num: 3, [BSD sub-partitions immediately follow]
    BSD Partition num: 'a',  Filesystem type is ffs, partition type 0xa5
    BSD Partition num: 'b',  Filesystem type unknown, partition type
0xa5
    BSD Partition num: 'e',  Filesystem type is ffs, partition type 0xa5
    BSD Partition num: 'f',  Filesystem type is ffs, partition type 0xa5
    BSD Partition num: 'g',  Filesystem type is ffs, partition type 0xa5

All of which looks okay - though I'm surprised the Linux swap on
partition 1 is an 'unknown' filesystem type.

> Also, recheck your BIOS setting. If your BIOS really supports LBA, it
> should have a setting about your drive.

When I did this I found no -obvious- setting ... but as I said before,
passing the 'lba32' flag with LILO works. Strange. The thing that I was
hoping GRUB would do (that LILO seems not to be able to do) is 'trick'
the Windows partition into believing it was first (using GRUB's 'map'
command) and thus allow me to install Win98 'between' the Linux and
FreeBSD partitions.

If that just won't work (and it seems it won't in this case) I am next
going to try some fancy tricks with GNU parted and see if I can move the
partitions around w/o losing any data, put the Win partition first,
install Win, reinstall LILO, and be done with it.

Thanks for the response and Happy New Year.

Glenn