[ltp] GRUB disk geom problems

Sean O Sullivan linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Sat, 10 Jul 2004 11:55:47 +0100


sltp@rhythm.cx wrote:
> 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.
> 
Sounds like problem here : http://lwn.net/Articles/86835

If you can boot into linux at all ... type :
sfdisk -d /dev/sda/ |egrep -v '^(Warning|DOS)' | sfdisk  --no-reread 
-H255 /dev/hda



To get into linux, you could pass : linux hda=14593,255,63
where that obviously will correspond to YOUR disk ...
255=heads
63=sectors/tracks
14593=cylinders


Regards,

Sean