Hi,

I installed a suse 11.3 on my acer laptop and it worked just fine for two days.I was able to use internet as well though wi-fi driver i still had to figure out.This morning when i started it, it gave me an error like this:-
Failed to load grub
Error 18

now from what i understand is the solution is to downsize the harddisk partition used by the linux root to somewhat 10gb.Mine is about 40gb.So i thought why not re-install the os again.But even after changing the bios setting to boot from cd-rom and putting in the suse dvd still its not booting from dvd and continously giving this error
Error 18:Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS
and then it comes to a command prompt
like this
grub>

Please help me i dont want to go back to windows anyhow, i am a big suse fan.
thanks
mithuns

odd
did you let the suse installer reformat the hard drive to ext4
or are you trying to install to a VERY OLD fat32 format
or is this a dual boot with windows xp

also just how big( or small) did you make the /boot partition ? - 100 meg is average

the wiki here at LQ
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/GRUB#Error_18
and over at the suse forum-- need to register
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/g...rror-18-a.html

that 10 gig max is for very very OLD versions of linux, and running them on very old hardware


so we are going to need some info on your set up
single boot suse only ?
dual boot ?
is the computer(acer laptop ) a bit old ? or very low on resources , like 512 meg ram .

When you entered the BIOS, you may have inadvertently changed a critical hard drive parameter which prevents you from booting from the hard drive. Go back into the BIOS, and check the hard drive parameters which show cylinder, sector, etc. One of the parameters should be set to LBA (I believe that stands for Large Block Address) in order for the BIOS to address portions of the hard drive beyond the 1024 cylinder limit, or some such thing. At any rate, set that one parameter to LBA and it should correct the problem.

You can read more about it in the Large Disk HOWTO

This suggests to me that your DVD drive is having trouble reading your disk.

It still doesn't explain your grub issue. We do need to know if you're dual booting Windows. Problems like this are why I usually use a /boot partition separate from (and prior to) root.

hi

@John
yes my hard drive had a 100 gb primary partition for FAT32 which i thought of keeping for later installing windows, and two more 30 gb each partition both NTFS.After that i had the root,boot and swap partitions for linux.I think the problem may have come coz the initial cylinders had FAT partition and grub may not have been loaded in the mbr part, this is what i could guess. The acer laptop is a new one just 3 months old, it has a 320 gb sata hdd and a intel i5 processor with 3gb ddr III ram.I wanted it to be a dual boot but i am fine with linux also as long as it works fine.So,last night i tried re-installing this time i removed all the ntfs partitions and the df output i am pasting here:-

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 305339656 6344932 283484352 3% /
devtmpfs 1374872 260 1374612 1% /dev
tmpfs 1376312 424 1375888 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 247919 26416 208703 12% /boot
i gave 250mb as boot 2gb-swap 250gb-root rite now i am online using the same laptop
so i am keeping my fingers crossed,hoping this time everything works fine.
@bigrigdriver i would like to tell you that i didnt made any such changes in the bios.
@gd2shoe dvd drive is working fine

anyways thanks to all, i guess i have to download a lot of other drivers like for my wi-fi,nvidia video card and webcam.

Fat32 is SO OLD ( 1995) that unless it is a usb thumb drive i would not use it .

if the very first partition is a fat one and grub was put there ( on the MBR)
that might do it

try reformatting the drive to two primary partitions
I like the" Gparted live cd " for this
the FIRST one blank- no format or ext4
the other NTFS
and install suse to the blank one

but be warned installing win7 after suse .Win7 WILL KILL grub and install the windows boot loader on top of it
"we are the Microsoft ... you will be assimilated ... Resistance Is Futile "
you will have to reinstall grub .

That's the typical technique. There is another.

If I suspect I'll need to reinstall windows at some point, I'll install grub to the /boot partition instead of the MBR, and set it as active (bootable). This way, when Windows is installed, all I need to do is change the active partition in the partition table.

Just a thought.

(And yes, FAT32 is only good for data-sharing volumes or very, very old operating systems.)