[Tfug] Bootloader Issues

[Don Freeman]

When the bigger drives first came out most of the drive manufacturers
provided a utility to facilitate operation with bios' that did not directly
support them. I think it was known as a dynamic overlay. It installed on the
drive (I think in the boot loader position) and was permanent. The only way
to get rid of it was to repartition. What brand is your drive? I may have
what you need.


Don W. Freeman, P.E.
Transportation Engineer
Pima Association of Governments
177 N. Church Ave. #405
Tucson AZ 85701
(520) 792-1093 voice
(520) 620-6981 fax

-----Original Message-----
From: tfug-bounces at tfug.org [mailto:tfug-bounces at tfug.org] On Behalf Of DON
KIERZEK
Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2007 6:47 PM
To: tfug at tfug.org
Subject: Re: [Tfug] Bootloader Issues

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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