Bugzilla – Bug 156473
Grub Error 18 after first reboot
Last modified: 2006-04-03 14:21:01 UTC
I installed beta7 new on the system and added a crypted home partition with Yast. On first reboot, the system comes up with a grub error 18 and does of course not start. /etc/grub.conf: setup --stage2=/boot/grub/stage2 (hd0,2) (hd0,2) quit
Please give more information. Do you suspect the problem to be YaST or GRUB itself? Attach the YaST logfiles in the first case, also attach `fdisk -l', and your resulting fstab. Check it for errors. What did you configure how exactly?
Well, I don't know if the problem comes from YaST or GRUB. And I am having trouble to attach the entire logfile because I can access the system only via booting a rescue system and do not have net. fstab says: /dev/hda3 / reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 1 /dev/hda2 /home reiserfs acl,user_xattr 1 2 /dev/hda1 swap swap defaults 0 0 fdisk -l /dev/hda1 1 129 1036161 82 Linux swamp /dev/hda2 130 2323 17623305 83 Linux /dev/hda3 * 2324 3629 10490445 83 Linux Machine is available live at my desk at 3.1.16 Configured nothing special beside the crypto partition for /dev/hda2 and I am not sure if the entry in fstab is correct for cryptopart.
It seems to be this problem: 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 in general). and since I used /dev/hda3 for booting it seems that the startcylinder is too high. I did a new installation.
This is not good - if this ancient problem still exists we have to either: 1) Warn the user explicitly about this condition or deny the configuration at all 2) Going back to the traditional scheme - using a seperate boot-partition Klaas, what machine are you using, give more information about your hardware.
Well, it's an ordinary IBM Notebook. All I did was letting my boot partition start at a quite high cylinder. Don't know any more on what because I need the system. Fixed that by putting the the boot partition into a logic partition and used a boot partition. But yes - an errormessage would be fine if that is doable. What information do you need from my computer?
Reassigning to Olaf for a comment.
Yes, such machines still exist, not only notebooks suffer from a 2GB limit. The BIOS cannot access beyond 2GB, you install parts of the boot loader above this limit => system won't boot, end of story. Unfortunately there's no reliable method besides trial and error to detect this. Klaas: in this very special case of yours: is your "ancient" IBM laptop one of those with a "rescue partition" at the end of the disk? That's a slightly different problem of some particular IBM laptops and can be solved.
Well, I am not really satisfied with that. My laptop runs after I installed the Grub properly. But for customers who have no glue about that at all, it is a bad picture: They install, everything seems to be fine, and finally, "end of story" ;-) Why don't we come up with a popup that says "You are about to install grub in a partition that starts on a cylinder higher than 2GB. That might cause problems. Are you really sure?"