During installation (from 5 CD's previously downloaded) Linux installs system files from CD #1. It then reboots and I get 'stage 1.5 grub error 18'. I understand that this is because Grub has been placed in a location that it can't then access [outside the 1024 sector limit].

(1) what do I need to do during set up to overcome this?

(2) are there any screenshots anywhere that I can look at to help me to make sure Grub is placed in an appropriate location?

During installation, SUSE gives details of partitions and it's something to do with this, but I need to walk through the process [hence screenshots].

Cheers in advance.

install the bootloader into the MBR (should give an option on where to install it)

I hope you do not have a modern computer as that is supposed to be resolved in recent bios updates.

easy solution is go into bios and look for LBA setting and save it then try again.

have a bo peep at my tutorial.

no screenshots sorry.

You have not mentioned if you need to keep any other operating systems like MS but if you do not and the above bios trick failed AND you prefer not to flash your bios as its new.....I repeat new....then you use a live cd to create a PRIMARY partition of about 100 Megs that is the first partition of your bios detected first drive or the drive that is to be linux on it.

a nice graphical program call qtparted is available on knoppix or kanotic cds for you.


good luck

are you trying to make your system a dual boot: meaning, you also have windows (or any other system) still installed?
Or are all your disks formattable?
How many hard disk do you have in it?

I currently have WinXP installed and wanted to have a dual boot system with Win and SUSE 10.0.

During install from SUSE CD #1, I had a good look for where Grub was to be placed, but I don't remember being given the option of putting it into MBR.

Most posts in these forums advise just letting SUSE do all the work during install. But that didn't work for me.

You need to describe your hardware configuration better. Do you have, what I'd call a standard config, ie, on board IDE HD, CD, Floppy or something unique? I've seen grub get confused when I was installing a dual boot system where the boot drive was not on the motherboard IDE but on a PCI IDE adapter card. I finally got it to work but you have to pay REAL close attention to the install as the default setup from SuSE when it wants to partition and in particular, place your boot can be wrong so you just don't want to let it do it's thing and go.

I have :

KS75A motherboard [relatively old - BIOS as new as poss for this board]
235 Gb IDE hard drive
512 Mb DDR RAM
128 Mb graphics
AMD Athlon 2000XP CPU
DVD Rom
CD Read/Write
Win XP SP2

I'm getting so fed up with installing SUSE and then finding error 18 on reboot (after CD #1). I know during set up that SUSE gives info on current partitions and suggests where it will put its files, but without being confident what I'm looking at, how do I know it's gonna be OK on reboot.