Fedora Users — Re: Dual-booting FC2 and WinXP: am I safe?

lwj wrote:

Since installing FC2, I've booted both FC2 and XP several times with
no apparent errors.  It's been so reliable that I'd not worried about
my hard drives until I read the article mentioned above.  Is it safe
for me to assume that I've managed to avoid the problem?  If so, did I
avoid it on accout of my dual hard drive setup, because I didn't
repartition my Linux hard drive, or perhaps on account of some more
mysterious reason?  :-)

From what I understand, and my own personal experience, the problem

either happens or it does not.

I think you are safe.

I was upgrading a computer today and had to reinstall a corrupted boot loader, after the disk was ghosted. When I ran grub-install, I noticed option to grub on the help screen.

`--force-lba'
    Force GRUB to use LBA mode even for a buggy BIOS. Use this option
    only if your BIOS doesn't work properly in LBA mode even though it
    supports LBA mode.

My question is if running 'grub-install /dev/whatever --force-lba' would correct (or get by) the geometry problem? I encountered this problem earlier and got past the problem by setting the disk to LBA instead of auto mode. I was going to try the option tomorrow on the computer that had the problem. I just wondered if anyone has already tried this option to grub-install yet.

--
Learn to pause -- or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you.