[Tfug] Bootloader Issues

[Nate]

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Try creating a /boot partition of about 256 megs in size as the first
primary partition.  That might fix it.  I know you used to have to do
that years ago because of the bios limitations on number of sectors it
sees, or whatever.

Nate

Nathanial Hendler wrote:
> I'm out of ideas regarding this.  I think buying a smaller HD would make all
> of my troubles go away, but that's too easy.
> 
> I have an old laptop (10 year old Toshiba 420CDT) with a bios that doesn't
> seem to support more than a 20GB drive (when I try to partition a 40GB drive
> in it with fdisk, it only sees 20GB).  So, I have put a 40GB drive in it
> that I had lieing around, and tried installing Debian on it.  Debian
> installs without complaint, but GRUB won't boot.  I tried LILO too.  One
> time I installed using the whole disk as one large partition.  Then I tried
> having a small (5GB) root partition and a /home partition that was 10GB so
> no part of the OS was over 20GB.  Didn't work.
> 
> I put FreeDOS on a 5gb partition.  Using the FreeDOS bootloader, it would
> boot FreeDOS just fine.  I then installed linux on the next 13GB, and
> pointed the FreeDOS booatloader at the linux primary partition, but it
> wouldn't boot linux (no surprise).
> 
> Any ideas on how to get this drive to work?  You can tell me to buy a new
> drive, I had a smaller drive on it running linux just fine, but at this
> point I'm just curious why I can't do this.  It doesn't seem like I
> shouldn't be able to run linux with this setup as long as I stay within the
> first 20GB of the drive.
> 
> Thanks,
> Nathan
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
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- --
Nate
System Admin Manager
System Administration
Ext 220
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