[Tfug] Bootloader Issues

Tue Oct 30 18:46:53 MST 2007

Check your BIOS and see if you have an option to enable LBA.  If you can, do 
so  (not likely due to the age of the computer).  Another possibility is to 
upgrade your BIOS.  These are two common solutions to problems booting older 
machines booting larger hard drives.  This is a link to Toshiba's site to 
upgrade BIOS:  
http://support.toshiba.ca/support/download/files_Archive/Index/bios_upgrade.html.

Another problem is something amiss in the device.map file in /boot/grub/   
(text file).  You can download Super Grub Disk, copy it to CD and it should 
boot Debian if it did install and you should be able then to go to the 
device.map file and make any necessary changes.  This link:  
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/SuperGrubDiskPage.html - has a lot of 
information, documentation and explanations of what Super Grub does as well 
as a download link.  If you are able to boot to Debian with Super Grub, 
check your menu.lst file also.

>From: "Nathanial Hendler" <nathanhendler at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Tucson Free Unix Group <tfug at tfug.org>
>To: tfug at tfug.org
>Subject: [Tfug] Bootloader Issues
>Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:55:39 -0600
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>
>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
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