Hello,

I got an old p120mhz machine and slacked it. Im booting slack from a floppy, but now i wanna install grub.
Partitions:
hd1: 20gb
windows fat32 ~13gb
linux reiserfs ~7gb
hd2: 1.2gb
fat32 ~1gb
linux swap ~200mb
The only problem is that I have ez-bios installed, because the bios doesnt support drives >8gb (1024 cylinder stuff??).
How can I put grub on my harddisk, without messing up ez-bios? Note that the reiserfs partition is over the 1024 cylinder boundary.
I used grub floppy to boot slackware, no success, error about the 1024 cylinder boundary. Worked fine after ez-bios > floppy boot (however i couldnt load slackware but that was because i forgot the commands).

please help me

Are you using the most recent release of the Bios for your board?

Try to get one for this old pc - you'll not have any luck!

on contrair my friend, I had a very similar issue, and found an update Perhaps you could have the same luck?

What is the board manufacturer?

thats the big prob...i dont know. intel 8240vx i think..well at least i searched google and there were many forum posts about that the manufacturer (ppl say its made by 'full') is bankrupt and the site disappeared..

Hmm, that sounds wonderful, ok next thing, is to get all the current BIOS information. And you can check their site out.

dont understand this

LOL sorry, I didn't mean to confuse you

Ok, when you boot up your pooter, you can get into the bios, correct?

Once in the bios, on the top, or somewhere on the screen, you should have a couple lines that tell you the BIOS manufacturer, the bios name, and some numbers. Give me that information and I can help you see if the Manufacturer of the BIOS has any updates for you.

Here you go:
Is there a way to get grub working WITHOUT a bios update??

you shouldn't need ez-bios for linux. if you were to ditch windows then linux will handle the bios itself. I used to need EZ to get win98 to run on my p200 server, but redhat doesn't care.... it does it all itself just fine.

yea but grub wont load linux without ez-bios - its saying that the partition is over the 1024 cylinder boundary.

Hold on . . . I just noticed that you have dual boot setup, that means that its not your bios thats causing a problem! Yikes, sorry dark.

It is starting to sound to me like it is something with the Slackware floppy, perhaps its configured wrong.

Let me as you a question though, why did you choose slack? I tried install slack, and I found it to be very difficult for even moderate linux knowledge, such as me. Just wondering tho.

I began with SuSE a few weeks ago, and it was slow, and I had many problems with it. Then I decided to slack this old pentium 120mhz pc . I like slackware, esp. because the boot process is very fast .
I can use the slackware floppy without problems (and without ez-bios), but I think that is because the floppy has its own vmlinuz kernel thing, where GRUB is trying to load it from the harddisk. The floppy's vmlinuz initializes the harddisk (and >1024 cylinder support), while GRUB doesn't; GRUB is just not able to see/read anything above the 1024th cylinder (where slackware is installed).
What can I do to setup GRUB? Install GRUB in the mbr of my harddisk (I think this corrupts ez-bios, or let ez-bios load after GRUB), in the boot sector of my first partition (my windows partition, which is loaded by default. I don't know if this is possible) or in the boot sector of linux?
Also, how can I set the partition which my pc loads at startup (without GRUB of course)?

I'm starting to catch on now . I think this might get down to partioning.

Do you have a "boot" partition for GRUB to live on? Or if not, in the process of installing slack, did it ask you since there was no "boot" partition, did you want to install on the MBR?

Another option, if you are pretty sure it's grub, is to try LILO, just to see if you can get it working, then go back and switch to grub

ahhh lookee here -> http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3...0/2/0/3376488/