Grub Error 18 SATA

[bobz713]

I was fast asleep on a cold and rainy night, when suddenly I awoke to "tick tick tick vrmmm....tick tick tick vrmmm...tick tick tick vrmmm". It appeared to be emminating from my computer. I thought to myself "this is not a noise I would want to here from my 2 month old comp that I just built", and indeed, it wasn't. After closer inspection, I discoverd that the noise was comming from my older 160gig ATA slave that I recycled from my previous, non-SATA compatable computer.

I tried using the comp and it wouldnt even boot to grub, I got an error message saying taht it couldnt find a harddrive.

Later the next day, I yanked the poor dead slave outa my computer and tried to boot. To my suprise, I managed to get to the Grub screan. However, when i try to select either Suse 10.1 or windows XP home, I get

"Error: 18 cylinder exceeds values set in BIOS"

My friend is the one that set me up with Suse, he did all the installing and everything, and I just play around with it as if I were a spider monkey playing with a rubiks cube.

Im 100% sure that both linux and windows were installed onto my master HD, so im nor sure why removing my slave would screw things up so much.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Any help would be much appreciated

[eraker]

Here's what the Gentoo Guide to Grub Errors says:

6. Grub Error 18

Situation

Code Listing 6.1: Grub Output

kernel (hd1,4)/bzImage root=/dev/hdb7

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds max supported by BIOS

Solution

This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area. This generally happens if your disk is larger than the BIOS can handle (512MB for (E)IDE disks on older machines or larger than 8GB in general).

Try an update for your BIOS and/or move your boot partition to the front (or at least into the appropriate range).

[bobz713]

Try an update for your BIOS and/or move your boot partition to the front (or at least into the appropriate range).

Cool, but how do i move the boot partition to the front or into the appropriate range?

[devils casper]

Cool, but how do i move the boot partition to the front or into the appropriate range?

GParted !






casper

[bobz713]

Hmm...i tried Gparted, but i kept getting an error when it was in the middle of installing itself, or booting itself, or whatever the hell it was doing. Is there another program that might work? or is there just a quick fix that i can do? perhaps some way to trick/scare the grub into behaving?

[devils casper]

Upgrade your computer's BIOS, if possible. Contact your computer manufacturer about obtaining the BIOS upgrade software and instructions.





casper

[bobz713]

its like a 2 month old motherboard tho, it shouldnt be the problem.

[devils casper]

Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds max supported by BIOS

its like a 2 month old motherboard tho, it shouldnt be the problem

thats weird. Latest MotherBoards doesn't have cylinder limit problem.




casper

[bobz713]

and there wasnt a problem before i removed my slave. it doesnt make sence