GRUB and large disk support

[dave at math.mit.edu (David Backeberg)]

I haven't heard about problems like this with SUSE, although it could 
possibly be a known issue.

How was linux / windows installed? Which went first? Did you:
a) partition with knoppix / fdisk
b) install Windows on NFTS partition
c) install SUSE on linux partitions, complete with grub?

At the end of Windows install, I *think* the install puts bootloader stuff 
in the MBR as well as stuff at the beginning of the partition it claims as 
C:

To the best of my knowledge, grub goes in MBR and replaces the Windows 
boot loader stuff there, and the chainloader entry hops to the right part 
of the c: partition to jumpstart the windows boot. By any chance did this 
person first install windows across a single very large partition, then 
shrink it to 50MB with some tool, and then install linux and break their 
windows boot? I haven't had problems with the method I described. What 
tool did they try that successfully shrank the partition?

Also, there's some trick about the makeactive line. I don't remember 
the detail, but you _may_ need to toggle the active flag using fdisk 
for the Windows XP partition (and therefore XP) to successfully boot.

You should get a helpful error message at the time when you can't reach 
stage2, which I think is where grub processes the "chainloader" entry in 
grub.conf

Here's how mine looks:
default 2
timeout 10

title Gentoo 2.6.9
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9 root=/dev/hda6

title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader  +1

-- 
David Backeberg (dave at math.mit.edu)
Network Staff Assistant
MIT Math Dept.
Rm. 2-332            (617) 253-4995

On Wed, 29 Dec 2004, Jerry Feldman wrote:

> I received an email from a friend who installed SuSE 9.2 on a WindowsXP
> system where XP was installed in the first 50GB. GRUB fails to find
> stage2. He then resized Windows down to 25GB, and GRUB was successful.
>
> In any case, one possible solution that I could suggest is to use the
> Windows XP boot loader, but neither of us know how to configure it.
>
>