GRUB Geom Error

Soniku · 05-06-2006, 02:26 PM

Hi, I'm new here, but I've been lurking for a while... And um yeah, that's my generic newbie introduction.

To make a long story short, I used Partition Magic (Windows XP) on my 160GB hard drive, so that I could shrink the size of my NTFS partition (just for files) that took up the entire drive down to about 130GB. I then installed XP on a 10GB parition, which worked fine. Afterwards, I installed Fedora Core 5 on the rest of the drive... I made the /boot partition (ext3) 100MB, the /swap partition 1024MB, and the rest all went to / (ext3).

During the installation, I left the default options of GRUB being installed to the MBR, and I didn't turn on LBA support.

Now, everytime I boot my PC, I receive an error message that reads "GRUB Geom Error", and naturally I can't get past the prompt to get into XP or FC5. I tried messing around with grub.conf, reinstalling FC5 since I thought I effed up the boot partition (long story), etc.

My partition table reads as follows:

Code:

Device             Start     End       Size        Type

/dev/hda

hda1               1         15666     122887M     NTFS
hda2               15667     19456     29729M      Extended
        hda5       15667     16941     10001M      NTFS
        hda6       16942     16954     101M        EXT3
        hda7       16955     17085     1027M       Swap
        hda8       17086     19456     18597M      Ext3
Free Space         19457     19457     7M          Freespace

Also, the last time I ran Disk Druid, I got 2 error messages... One was that hda6 wasn't readable (I think) due to an invalid argument, and the other was the same, except in reference to hda8

I'm thinking that maybe I should reinstall GRUB with LBA support (since this seems to be a hard disk geometry issue), but I'm just getting pissed off at it right now, and would like some advice to turn to while I work on this.

All help is appreciated, thanks.

syg00 · 05-06-2006, 05:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Soniku

During the installation, I left the default options of GRUB being installed to the MBR, and I didn't turn on LBA support.

that was a mistake - non-LBA mode will restrict you to the first 1024 cylinders. Lets say 8 Gig. If you are going to be doing that sort of thing (why ???), make sure the /boot is at the front of the disk.

Quote:

I'm thinking that maybe I should reinstall GRUB with LBA support (since this seems to be a hard disk geometry issue)

Should work. I'm surprised that Druid complains about the ext3 partitions - once Linux is up, it will only use LBA.

No, I take that back - I refused to be surprised at anything that Redhat/Fedora do ...