At the begining of installing 12.1 (I’m installing on a previous 11.2 system that is working fine for years) I get this message:
The loader is installed on a partition it does not lie entirely below 128 gigabytes
The system might not boot to bios support only lba 24 result is error 18 during install grub mbr
I decide to abort because I don’t want to hang my grub.
I dual boot Suse and WinXP.
If you are booting from the same partition that is working with 11.2, then you already know that it will work. So ignore the warning.
If you have reorganized the disk, and will be booting from a different partition - then it’s a guess. Recent computers should not have a problem with this.
The only computer I have that could conceivable run into this problem, has a 60G hard drive. So it won’t actually run into the problem unless I replace the hard drive with something bigger than 128G.
To say that differently - if your computer came with a hard drive that is bigger than 128G, then the chances are that your computer is new enough so that there won’t be a problem.
I think there will be a problem then.
I have two hard disks, the original 200G and a newer 240G.
However, I split partitioned both of those (suse/winxp) , so linux only gets a 100G on the first and a 120G on the secon, minus the boot partition etc.
Could that cause the problem?
I’m almost at the point of thinking about getting rid of the WinXp partitions, but if there’s someway to keep using it…
My desktop (Dell, purchased 2007) has no problem with the 128G. Nor does my more recent laptop.
It seems that you are below the 128G mark on both disks. So create a small partition, somewhere between 100M and 1G, as close to the beginning of the disk as you can. And as long as that will be within the first 128G of the disk you should be fine. In the install, set that small partition up as “/boot” and the installer will put the grub loader there. If you can make that a primary partition, that’s better. But it is not actually necessary for it to be primary.
I’m also using a Dell (Precision T1600) with a Dual boot Suse 10 and Windows 7.
This morning, I had the same error 18 at Grub startup, and I have solved by a simple modification in the bios.
I don’t no why, but the disk option was changed in AHCI. I’ve modified for RAID and it’s working !
I have a HP Pavillion with W7, and I left 250 Gb for an extended part. : 1 part 5 Gb swapp, 1 part 40 ext4 and 1 part 205 Gb ext 4, made with parted Magic, and have the same problem. I had working the Gnome 3.2 but it had some features disabbled, and I tried to reinstall it, but now it is not possible. Can I install it and try to correct it by grub options?
This forum message is kind of old and your problem can be missed. Everyone can start their own new message if they wish. For your case, let me post some partitioning info, but feel free to start a new thread.
Each hard drive can have up to four PRIMARY partitions, any of which could be marked active and bootable. No matter what you might hear, only one of the first four primary partitions can be booted from. That means you can boot from Primary partitions 1, 2, 3 or 4 and that is all. In order to boot openSUSE, you must load openSUSE and the grub boot loader into one of the first four partitions. Or, your second choice is to load the grub boot loader into the MBR (Master Boot Record) at the start of the disk. The MBR can be blank, like a new disk, it can contain a Windows partition booting code or generic booting code to boot the active partition 1, 2, 3, or 4. Or, as stated before, it can contain the grub boot loader. Why load grub into the MBR then? You do this so that you can “boot” openSUSE from a logical partition, numbered 5 or higher, which is not normally possible. In order to have more than four partitions, one of them (and only one can be assigned as extended) must be a extended partition. It is called
an Extended Primary Partition, a container partition, it can be any one of the first four and it can contain one or more logical partitions within. Anytime you see partition numbers 5, 6 or higher for instance, they can only occur inside of the one and only Extended Primary partition you could have.
What does openSUSE want as far as partitions? It needs at minimum a SWAP partition and a “/” partition where all of your software is loaded. Further, it is recommended you create a separate /home partition, which makes it easier to upgrade or reload openSUSE without losing all of your settings. So, that is three more partitions you must add to what you have now. What must you do to load and boot openSUSE from an external hard drive? Number one, you must be able to select your external hard drive as the boot drive in your BIOS setup. Number two, you need to make sure that the external hard drive, perhaps /dev/sdb, is listed as the first hard drive in your grub device.map file and listed as drive hd0. I always suggest that you do not load grub into the MBR, but rather into the openSUSE “/” root primary partition which means a primary number of 1, 2, 3 or 4. If number one is used, then that will be out. You will mark the openSUSE partition as active for booting and finally you must load generic booting code
into the MBR so that it will boot the openSUSE partition. I suggest a partition like this:
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Thank You,