Re: [bug #19357] Shuttle AK37 + Pomise Ultra 133 TX2, Error 18 when booting kernel on /dev/hde (250GB)

[Slawomir Ligus]

Hi! 
 
[...]
 
> Relevant parts of the hardware configuration:
> - Shuttle AK37 motherboard with Athlon-XP 2400 (@2GHz)
> - Promise Ultra 133 TX2 card
> - 2x Maxtor 80GB drives (/dev/hda, /dev/hdb, on motherboard IDE-0, master -
> slave) seen as hd0 and hd1 by Grub
> - 1x Optiarc DVD writer (/dev/hdc, mb IDE-1, master)
> - 1x 250GB Samsung HDD (/dev/hdd, mb IDE-1, slave) seen as hd2
> - 1x 250GB WDC HDD (/dev/hde, Promise card IDE-0, solo) seen as hd3
>
> Grub:also
> Grub is on /dev/hda, root is (hd0,6)
> - working kernel is /vmlinuz with root=/dev/hda8, parameters: noapic udev
> quiet
> - other kernel is (hd3,4)/vmlinuz with root=/dev/hde6, parameters: noapic
> quiet

Well, 250GB is rather a large hard drive. Sometimes despite LBA only something 
about 
the first 172GB are accessible by GRUB. I can see you have your kernel image 
there
on the fifth partition. What's the size of the partitions you have there?

Does grub console on booting show you the relevant partition?
grub> find /vmlinuz
Does it show you (hd3,4) ? 

> Problem:
> On boot selecting the second kernel invokes Error 18.

>From GRUB manual:
...   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).

Maybe think about reorganizing your hde drive, so that /vmlinuz
is somewhere nearer to the first cylinder rather than the last one?

Best Regards,
Slawek Ligus
openSUSE TechSupport