Karl Larsen wrote:
I now have the /boot part of my whole system. But it would be easy
to make a new partition of say 100 MB the first thing on the second
hard drive. My question is what do I need to do so the new /boot
works?
I did something similar with a dual-boot system: Windows on the
original first drive, all by itself. And Linux installed on an added
second drive, all by itself.
While setting up GRUB, you define its root (where /boot/ is) with a
"root (hd1,0)", then "setup (hd0)" which puts the bootloader onto the
first drive MBR, and quit out of the GRUB shell.
[root@bigblack ~]# grub
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd0)
grub> quit
[root@bigblack ~]#
In this scenario, the computer boots, reads the MBR on my first drive,
which starts off GRUB from my second drive.
I believe that you can even set that up from within the GRUB start up
screen. Just hit the right hot key to get into the command line. You
can also do it from the rescue disc, so you can get a system working
that's not currently booting.
I know Tim and that is what I use now that works. I have grub at
(hd0) and the Linux is at (hd1,5). This works fine so why move /boot?
I am certain that (hd1,5) is about 100 GB up from start of the
second drive. And it works.
I thought this whole thread was about this setup not working all the
time. What does fdisk -l say about the cylinder range of that 5th
partition?
Well it is the sixth partition. This is (hd1,5) in grub talk :-)
Disk /dev/sdb: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 1217 9775521 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 1218 1945 5847660 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 1946 1961 128520 82 Linux swap /
Solaris
/dev/sdb4 1962 18534 133122622+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 1962 7060 40957686 83 Linux
/dev/sdb6 7061 12159 40957686 83 Linux
/dev/sdb7 12160 18534 51207156 83 Linux
[root@k5di ~]#
Now you can see sdb6 starts at cylinder 7061 which the hell and gone
above 1100 :-(
So thanks for the idea for quantizing the fact. I think it's clear my
1994 BIOS works far better than the so-called standard. 8-)
The hard drive addressing limits in bios have evolved slowly and
painfully over time starting from 32 Megs in DOS. The next limit after
1024 cylinders was a 24 bit LBA address which would take you to around
128 gigs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Block_Addressing
I didn't do the math, but that error message you posted leaves no doubt
that you are exceeding the bios limit when you can't boot so your 6th
partition must span that range. But, regardless of what the limit
actually turns out to be, you could have easily avoided any such problem
by putting a small /boot at the beginning of the disk, something that
has been well known since the first drives over 9 gigs were manufactured.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
