Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 88558
Grub shipped with RH 9 0-93-4 does not work with high cylinder /boot
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:52:56 EDT
Description of problem: I loaded 9 clean and grub would not boot the system. I normally load RH linux into a high cylinder / partition and have had no problem doing this on any of my systems. I removed grub-0.93-4 and installed the version that came with 8.0 ie grub-0.92-7 and everything works fine. I have not had the time yet to try this on a low cylinder /boot so i am assuming that it is a high cylinder problem for now. I tried this on two systems - a tyan/amd based system and a dual intel P3 system with the same results. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Expected results: Additional info:
I have the same problem, but with a strange twist. After upgrading to RH 9 from RH 7.3, I noticed that before grub was loaded, my BIOS was misreporting my hard drive size (I have a 20 GB hard drive, and my BIOS was reporting it as a 1057 MB hard drive), and grub would boot to a prompt instead of showing the RH graphic. I figured that I would simply reset the parameters of the hard drive in my BIOS. So, I used the hard drive auto-detection mechanism in my BIOS, which found the hard drive with the correct parameters. I saved the configuration, rebooted the computer, and ... same thing! Right before grub loads, the hard drive size is misreported! I figured it might be a system BIOS caching problem, but I have system BIOS caching disabled. This problem didn't occur before upgrading to RH 9. Help?
I tried a 8.0 to 9 upgrade on a system that has a /boot partition at a low cyclinder and 9.0 grub worked fine. Also as per Devin my first clean 9 load also booted to a grub prompt which led me to the opinion that the new grub could not access the graphic files in the high cylinder /boot. I also tried a grub-install /dev/hda after booting from floppy. After doing that I did not get a grub prompt but instead got a error message I think it was error 17 but dummy me I did not write it down at the time.
> ... instead got a error message I think it was error 17 but > dummy me I did not write it down at the time. Yep, it's 17. I just got bit as well - exact same behavior. Downgrading to the RH8 GRUB 0.92 fixed the problem. I did notice that from the GRUB prompt, if I typed 'root (hd0,1)' I got a message saying '... cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS'. But it seems that the BIOS does handle it just fine.
The following may be related to this problem. One of my RH9 systems has four drives, a Maxtor 8Gb, two Maxtor 40Gb and a Western Digital 120Gb. The geometry command of Grub 0.93-4 misreports the number of cylinders of the 120Gb (35973cyl; BIOS (correctly) reports 232581cyl). The other drives are correctly reported. The 120Gb drives has RH9, the other drives are NT. Before upgrading from RH8 to RH9, I used to boot Grub from Windows NT. After upgrading this no longer worked. Grub reported "Geom Error" and hung. My resolution was to change my boot sequence: Grub now gets booted first and the NT bootloader is chain loaded from Grub. I don't know whether Grub 0.92 misreports the 120Gb as well since I never used the Grub geometry command before my recent upgrade.
> ------ Additional Comment #4 From Date J. Noorlag on 2003-04-20 19:21------ > > The following may be related to this problem. > > One of my RH9 systems has four drives, a Maxtor 8Gb, two Maxtor 40Gb and a > Western Digital 120Gb. The geometry command of Grub 0.93-4 misreports the > number of cylinders of the 120Gb (35973cyl; BIOS (correctly) reports > 232581cyl). > --snip-- Maybe I'm being unhelpful, but ... This looks like an overflow error. It looks like 2 bytes were used to hold the number of cylinders instead of 4 bytes: 232581 modulus 65536 = 35973 This doesn't fix the problem, but hopefully it will help out the person trying to fix the bug.
Does it work if you do '/sbin/grub-install --force-lba /dev/hda'
No --force-lba did not fix my orriginal problem but did change the the results - after the initial load on 9.0 the machine boots to a grub command line prompt. after booting the machine from a floppy and doing a '/sbin/grub-install --force-lba /dev/hda' grub gives the following "GRUB Loading stage1.5 GRUB Loading, please wait.... Error 17 "
Is this still a problem in current Fedora Core test releases?
Red Hat Linux is no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc. If you are still running Red Hat Linux, you are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/. Red Hat apologizes that these issues have not been resolved yet. We do want to make sure that no important bugs slip through the cracks. If this issue is still present in a current Fedora Core release, please open a new bug with the relevant information. Closing as CANTFIX.