Fixing bios/grub boot error 'geom'.
 

Today I spent a few hours installing Tinysofa 2.0 Classic on my older pc that I have planned to use as a home webserver. The installation could not have gone smoother, it recognized that it had low memory so activated swap and such and I easily selected the packages.

The problem came when I went to restart and It just came up with the error message 'grub grom error' instead of booting. I did a bit of reading and this seems to be because my bios only registers a 8gb harddrive while the linux system can see the full 20gb that is there. So my question is, is there any way to fix this and boot my computer properly? Or if possible some kind of rescue floppy disk or something to use while waiting for a permanent fix?

Thanks in advance, Luke

The first thing to do is to determine if the limitation is the BIOS (it's a non-LBA BIOS) itself or a setting in the BIOS (the BIOS is LBS-capable, but LBA is not set). Enter the BIOS and go into the hard drive settings. You should see the drive listed, as well as the number of cylinders, sectors, and heads. At the right-hand end of the line, select the mode (which may read Normal) and change it to LBA.

If the BIOS is not LBA-capable, you could try creating a small /boot partition as the first partition, with the rest of the filesystem in the second partition, and swap in the third partition. Having the bootable kernel image in a small partition at the beginning of the drive may allow normal booting of the system since the BIOS sees it as withing the 8 GB limit. Once the system is booted, the OS takes over. I don't think the BIOS interfers with writes to disk after the 8 GB limit once the OS is booted.

As you can see, this means re-partitioning and re-installing. But, if it works, it's worth the effort.

Thanks, I think I will try the /boot method as my hard drive is already to set to LBA but it doesn't seem to help anything, I'll just redo the install.