Hello, On Thu, 27 Aug 2009, Basil Chupin wrote:
David Haller wrote:
On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Basil Chupin wrote:
But when I install it on the new Seagates, it installs; however, on the first boot to complete the installation I get an error message, for example, "GRUB Loading stage2, Read Error" or "....Loading Stage1.5 Error 18".
Could it be that files in /boot/grub lie on sectors beyond 128GB?
And those of *Ubuntu before that?
That'd be the same class of problem as the 1023 Cylinder/8GB problem years ago.
Very interesting.... How do I find out if this is the case? fdisk? And how to solve if the problem is this barrier.
You can't really. The inode number (ls -li /boot/grub/) might give a hint, but I don't know if inode numbers are sequentially corresponding to higher block and sector numbers along the fs/disk. You can look up the total number of inodes with 'tune2fs -l /dev/sdaX).
I use the whole of the 160GB of each HD for MS6 with one (sda) split into ~159.5GB at the beginning of HD for (/) formatted in ext3 and the remaining for swap[1];
So, it is possible, some of grub's files ended up beyond the 128G ... BTW: that's actually putting swap into the slowest area of the disk ... If your grub-stuff has high inode numbers (over ~85% of the total), you could try to "move" it. Though I think, usually files are created from the low end of the inode-range, so the FS would have to be rather full for grub to end up in the high range. If you had swap as the first partition, things'd be easy (make a (temporary) /boot/ out of it). ATM, I'm a bit to tired to think up the right procedure for trying to get grub to "low inodes" ... Ask again (via PM) when you've looked up the inodes of /boot/grub/* ;) Anyway, the grub error is rather clear: ==== info grub: Errors reported by the Stage 2 [same for 1.5] ==== 18 : Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area. This generally happens if your disk is larger than the BIOS can handle (512MB for (E)IDE disks on older machines or larger than 8GB in general). ==== (this is from an oldish grub) ==== In short: grub can't reach the file via BIOS routines and with current grubs/BIOSes that translates to "LBA larger than 32GB / 128GB" (depending on BIOS, and the 32G "barrier" is "old" by now). Ideally, you should repartition your disk and if that can be done safely without a full backup to a third medium depends on how full the partitions are. Mail (here or via PM) a 'df -h' if you're interested.
[1] I have 1.5GB of RAM and have never had to create a swap partition of more than ~400MB in the past because swap is never used.
I've got 320 MB RAM in the old box, the 1G swap is used routinely, but also usually >100M for buffers/cache, on the new box with 1G RAM, swap exists but is little used. Typically, it's ~200-300 MB for programs (and X.org 7.x uses _a lot_ more than the XFree86 3.3.6 on the old box) and ~700M for buffers/cache. With 192M in the old box, there was enough, but not much for buffers/cache left. -dnh -- "Here, in the bare dark face of night / A calm unhurried eye draws sight -- We see in what we think we fear / The cloudings of our thought made clear" "A most interesting contribution, we're sure, but can we keep this just a little more focused?" -- GSV "Wisdom Like Silence" to LSV "Serious Callers Only" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org