Im trying to set up a FakeRaid on a machine of mine with windows 7 and ubuntu 9.04.

I was following this guide: http://bbossola.wordpress.com/2008/0...sata-fakeraid/

The problem is installing grub. When I try to set the root partition, I get an error saying that the cylinder is beyond what the BIOS supports. The way I had it set up was a windows 7 install at the front of the drive (includes the 100mb loader partition, followed by the main windows partition, ~1TB) and the swap and root partitions at the back. They are all primary partitions, I think. I was also wondering if the guide was installing Grub to the mbr, or the logical partition where ubuntu is.

Anyway, I think I screwed up the mbr with some random other stuff I did. So I guess it seems like the smart thing to do would be to get ubuntu working first before installing windows. Repairing grub isnt that hard, is it? Or at least, I have a better idea of how to do that than install it from scratch.

Thanks in advance for any help, its much appreciated.

well, you may be incorrect in trying to fix ubuntu first, since windows bootloader will over-write the grub installation in the MBR when you 'fix' windows! I would suggest going the other way around, with backups made!

The error means that the boot partition - which, in Ubuntu, is usually the same as root, is beyond what the bios supports. You have to update the bios, or create a seperate boot partition close to the start of the drive.

Thanks for the help guys.

I did some more looking around, and finally got both OS's installed, but the grub problem still remains. I guess that I really dont understand what this stuff does under the grub configure prompt/thingy:
Under my current setup (1TB ntfs partition, 4GB swap, 60GB ext3, in that order), device (hd0) gives me invalid device request, or something like that. When I try root (hd0), it works, but setup (hd0) fails. When I try find /boot/grub/stage1, it says the file is not found.

Now, I thought that if I was installing to the mbr, which is at the very front of the disk, that it wouldnt matter that /boot/grub is at the back.

I have also set the boot flags on the ntfs partition and the ext3 partition to see what would happen either way, but if grub is on the mbr, and the boot partition is set to be the third one, does this mean that the mbr is not read during boot, assuming my bios could do that?

Later today if I have time, I will probably try to make another 100mb boot partition and try to install grub there. However, I had similar problems the first time around.