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Re: [ot] <rant>grub is great!</rant> (was Re: woody Debian Installer plans)



On Sun, Sep 17, 2000 at 09:49:28AM -0700, ferret@phonewave.net wrote:
> > > One thing grub appears to be unable to do as well is compensate for a
> > > broken BIOS.. But except for fixing the BIOS, what can? I have a
> > > SCSI-based DEC server with an 8GB limited SCSI BIOS, and I didn't know it
> > > until I attempted to upgrade the hard drive.
> > > 
> > > grub was able to show me what the problem was (BIOS 'geomerty' was
> > > completely screwed up) but was unable to boot to the drive even from
> > > floppy. :/
> > 
> > Did you try install with the --force-lba parameter? It helped me.
> 
> Do you think I might be able to get grub booting off the hard drive with
> that option? I would have to take down the machine and install a VGA
> console into it to try, so I'd rather not unless you think it should work.

I can't tell you anything with certainty.

> Exactly how did you install grub on your disk?

GRUB from potato (or perhaps an older version, I don't recall) would install
on my 15.2GB IDE HDD, but the latest one wouldn't; I investigated it a bit
and found that the new version is stricter when it comes to LBA mode
settings in BIOS. I asked the upstream people that an option is made that
would force this, and they implemented it.

IIRC, I used this:
install --force-lba (hd0,5)/boot/grub/stage1 d (hd0) (hd0,5)/boot/grub/stage2 p

-- 
Digital Electronic Being Intended for Assassination and Nullification



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