On Sun, 2005-11-20 at 21:35 +0200, Mika Äijäläinen wrote: > Hi there! > > I have a dual boot system, Windows Xp and Fedora Core 4 ... but have a > little problem ... how to boot Fedora properly? I tried to configure the > boot settings with Wingrub, but it doesn't work ... when I try to boot > Fedora, I get a message "erroro 18: cannot mount the selected partition" ... > and the partition was the right one ... > > So, any other ways to make a dual boot system ... ? Here is what the error is: Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS 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 on others.). In more practical terms this means the BIOS is unable to start executing the kernel because the kernel is not located within the block it can access at boot up time. This can be circumvented by creating a boot partition at the beginning of the disk that is completely within the first 1023 cylinders of the harddrive. This partition will contain the kernel. The kernel it self does not suffer from the same limitations as the BIOS so after the BIOS has loaded the kernel the kernel will have no problem accessing the whole harddrive. Newer BIOSes will automatically translate the harddrives size in a way that it can be completely contained within the first 1023 cylinders and hence modern computers do not suffer from this problem. The same error can happen when the BIOS detects a disk in a different way as Linux does. This can happen when changing motherboards or when moving a GRUB-bootable disk from one computer to another. If this happens, just boot with a GRUB floppy, read the C/H/S numbers from the existing partition table and manually edit the BIOS numbers to match. If using a SUSE linux and installing on VM Ware this problem is solved by creating a small partition at the very beginning of the harddisc, and mounting it as /boot. ************************* As for WinGRUB I've no experience with it but here is the link to the home page to help solve problems. http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/ The error explanations are there and it looks like the same in all versions of GRUB. Without more information on the hardware, partitions and the setup it is difficult to offer suggestions.
