[Bug 597723] New: GRUB is not able to boot from partition greater that 60GB
http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=597723 http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=597723#c0 Summary: GRUB is not able to boot from partition greater that 60GB Classification: openSUSE Product: openSUSE 11.3 Version: Milestone 5 Platform: Other OS/Version: Other Status: NEW Severity: Major Priority: P5 - None Component: YaST2 AssignedTo: fehr@novell.com ReportedBy: juhliarik@novell.com QAContact: jsrain@novell.com CC: ug@novell.com Found By: --- Blocker: --- Hi Thomas, Uwe had problem with booting during his tests with autoyast. He found that if he used "/" partition greater than 60GB GRUB is not able to boot from it. I did some tests and there exist serious problem with booting. I mean simple configuration: * 2 GB swap partition (/dev/sda1) * 60 GB "/" partition (/dev/sda2) without any separate /boot partition only 2 partitions. GRUB configuration is valid and also GRUB stage1 is correctly written to disk. I found that there were major changes in storage and I think there could be a cause of problem with booting. (Older version: SLES11, openSUSE 11.2 works) I don't know details about changes in storage maybe it is not relevant and the fix should be added to GRUB. Please look at the problem and decide who and how could fix it and maybe you can add any specific details why it is problem to boot from partition greater than 60GB. The size of partition is not exact. The first test was with 140GB partition next 40GB partition works and 60 GB partition doesn't work. How to reproduce problem: ------------------------- * Start installation openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5 * Create simple partitioning of disk with only swap and root where root partition is greater than 60GB (I don't know exactly critical size of partition it is between 40 GB - 60 GB) -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #1 from Torsten Duwe
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Thomas Fehr
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Uwe Gansert
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Thomas Fehr
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--- Comment #4 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #5 from Thomas Fehr
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--- Comment #7 from Thomas Fehr
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Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #9 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #10 from Thomas Fehr
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--- Comment #11 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #12 from Thomas Fehr
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Torsten Duwe
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--- Comment #14 from Torsten Duwe
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--- Comment #15 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #16 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #17 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #18 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #19 from Jozef Uhliarik
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Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #22 from Torsten Duwe
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Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #24 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #25 from Jozef Uhliarik
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Torsten Duwe
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Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #28 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #29 from Uwe Gansert
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Jozef Uhliarik
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Uwe Gansert
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Torsten Duwe
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--- Comment #33 from Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #34 from Torsten Duwe
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Jozef Uhliarik
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--- Comment #36 from Uwe Gansert
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Torsten Duwe
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Torsten Duwe
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Torsten Duwe
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Jozef Uhliarik
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Thomas Fehr
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--- Comment #40 from Torsten Duwe
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--- Comment #41 from Thomas Fehr
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--- Comment #42 from Thomas Fehr
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--- Comment #43 from Thomas Fehr
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Petr Uzel
Added parted maintainer to CC: maybe there the same problem was discussed also on parted mailing list.
Nothing on parted mailing list, but there is https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_4_KiB_sector_issues by Tejun Heo, who is AFAIK expert in this area. Adding Tejun to CC:. -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #45 from Petr Uzel
Some more testing showed that it seems that the new alignment in parted of partition start to multiples of 2048 sectors seems to either confuse grub or the BIOS in a way that a considerable percentage of disk layouts that worked fine so far are not bootable.
Question is what to do now?
It seems that Ubuntu added an option to the partitioner that forces cylinder alignment to work around buggy BIOSes. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/partman-base/+bug/551965 (slightly different bug, but the solution might be the same). -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #46 from Tejun Heo
Nothing on parted mailing list, but there is https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_4_KiB_sector_issues by Tejun Heo, who is AFAIK expert in this area. Adding Tejun to CC:.
I definitely am not an expert on the subject. The document is just a result of me trying to find out what was going on and outside of driver my first hand knowledge is very limited. That said, it's true that vista and w7 are using 2k alignment by default and if the BIOS has problems dealing with that, which is a bit strange because it seems the BIOS already successfully loaded grub and after that point I can't think of why partition layout would have any effect on read requests but then again weird BIOS problems are surely conceivable. I heard that some BIOSes had problems with vista/w7 but I don't think the compatibility issue is wide spread and if we're seeing problems on wide collection of hardwares, it's more likely to be our problem. Is it possible to test vista or w7 on the machine? Thanks. -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #47 from Tejun Heo
if the BIOS has problems dealing with that, which is a bit strange because it seems the BIOS already successfully loaded grub and after that point I can't think of why partition layout would have any effect on read requests but then again weird BIOS problems are surely conceivable.
The above sentence doesn't really parse. Sorry, I forgot the structure of the sentence in the middle. :-) Anyways, in the ubuntu bug, those machines are hanging while the BIOS is trying to probe the drive which makes sense if it tries to read the partition table and tries to figure out geometry by matching up the CHS and LBA addresses and the code can't handle corner cases very well. I have no idea how vista/w7 deal with them but probably the best we can do is to match dmi data and default to chs alignment on those machines. Thanks. -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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Stephan Kulow
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--- Comment #50 from Torsten Duwe
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--- Comment #51 from Tejun Heo
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--- Comment #52 from Tejun Heo
For the partitioning: why can't we fake a "geometry" that allows for e.g. 4k alignment AND looks sane to ancient BIOSes?
There just doesn't seem to be any which all the different BIOSes could agree on which is aggravated by the fact that in many cases the first partition goes over the CHS addressing limit so the BIOS doesn't even have enough parameters to match up CHS and LBA addresses. :-( Another worry that I have is about deviating from what windows is doing. Vendors are testing their BIOSes against how windows is doing stuff so deviation might (I almost wanna say 'will' here) lead to strange unexpected problems for relatively modern and future configurations which is usually more important to properly support than older machines. Thanks. -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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--- Comment #53 from Torsten Duwe
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Stephan Kulow
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--- Comment #55 from Tejun Heo
So do I get you right you're implying this is a parted "bug", or better, missing feature, to not apply the same automagic that windoze fdisk does?
Umm... probably not as the problem hasn't been diagnosed yet. It's a bit strange for boot to halt at that point after all. For the LBA/CHS geometry problem, the usually reported mode of failure is hang during hard disk detection. If it is caused by boot partition living too far out in LBA, maybe we should change the default partition layout but at the same time there is only so much we can do given that co-installation w/ windows is pretty common.
Maybe the right choice even depends on DMI?
I'm afraid some cases might come down to that. :-( Thanks. -- Configure bugmail: http://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug.
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Thomas Fehr
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