On Monday 18 September 2006 7:41 am, Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:
Paul Abrahams wrote:
I think the weird grub behavior I've encountered really is related to BIOS limitations.
In my experience, if the BIOS allows you to use the full capacity of your drive, it is not limited. If it cannot see the drive without help, i.e. setting the jumper to limit drive size, or an overlay, then it is BIOS. In your case, it doesn't sound like BIOS.
I wish you were right about that. I'm totally baffled by the randomness of the response to root (hd0,7) when I load grub from a diskette. I would have thought that whatever the BIOS problems, the behavior would be consistent, since I don't see any nondeterministic processes involved. But this business of sometimes getting an Error 18 and sometimes getting a valid partition descriptor has me stumped.
As I mentioned earlier, my hard drive is a 200GB model and my motherboard is a Biostar P4M800-M7A, with an Award Bios v6.00PG. I'm now trying to update the BIOS, but I still don't know where to get information about the capacity of the current BIOS. I cannot find it anywhere in the BIOS configuration utility.
If all your grub files are OK, what happens when you install grub via the grub prompt?
Once I started getting that inconsistent behavior I stopped trying anything else because I couldn't count on the results being valid. I suppose I could keep issuing the root (hd0,7) command until it works, but then the results of anything else I did would still be in question.
After the root command, do you get back the correct info for your boot filesystem?
Either that or an Error 18, randomly.
When you run setup, do you see it finding everything and installing?
I never got that far.
Since I am running raid1, which grub cannot see (yet?), I install grub on both hd separately. It only takes those 2 commands to setup grub. There is output as well. Could you try those and give feedback regarding its output?
Without resolving the Error 18 problems, how would that produce reliable information? Paul