[ltp] GRUB disk geom problems

[linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org]

Hi. I'm running SuSE 9.1 on my T40. Today after I got home from work, GRUB
mysteriously became unable to boot my machine. After powering up I'd get the
GRUB command prompt rather than a menu. Attempting to manually boot my
kernel went like this:

  GRUB> root (hd0,3)
  GRUB> kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.5-....

  Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS.

Googling revealed that this means that my hard disk (80GB) is too large to
be fully understood by the BIOS, and GRUB depends on the BIOS to read the
hard disk. However my machine was working fine for a week or two now. I did
not make any changes to GRUB or the partitions. I don't recall installing
any SuSE updates today. Anyone know what might have caused this?

I am able to boot the machine to Linux just fine if I copy my kernel image
and initrd image to my FAT32 partition and do 'root (hd0,2)' above instead.
The machine runs fine once booted. I'm able to boot manually form GRUB into
XP by entering the chainloader commands.

My hard disk is partitioned as follows:

	hda1: NTFS 25GB
	hda2: Linux Swap 1GB
	hda3: FAT32 5GB
	hda4: reiserfs (the rest of the 80GB disk)

Googling also revealed that people were sometimes able to fix this by
twiddling with the BIOS settings for the hard disk (endabling LBA), but when
I went into the BIOS on my T40 I noticed that there apparently are no hard
disk settings like you'd usually find in most PCs. And at any rate, I didn't
change anything in the BIOS recently.

Anyone run into this? Any help is appreciated.