Thread: Installing GRUB after removing HDD
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Old 03-Jul-2009, 21:14
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Default Re: Installing GRUB after removing HDD
MBR is the first sector of the disk, which also contains the partition table. Also the first track of the disk is reserved for bootloaders. This initial GRUB code loads the stage2 bootloader and after that the kernel and initrd in the /boot directory.

Anything loaded by GRUB has to be reachable by the BIOS because that's all that GRUB has to do disk I/O. On older BIOSes, there is a 128GiB limit due to the size of the arguments to the BIOS I/O calls. It looks like your boot files are beyond this limit. That is why some machines require a /boot partition on the lower cylinders of the disk.

To fix this you need to put the boot files below the 128GiB mark. You may be able to use a gparted rescue to shrink / enough to insert a /boot partition before it and copy the boot files there.
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