Grub and a 1.5TB LD

English Install/Boot/Login
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I have 4 1.5 TB HDDs in my new computer. I can’t use a 4.5TB RAID5 like I wanted, because my RAID controller won’t let me split up the LDs like my old RAID controller did. It will only create 1 LD at 4.5TB. So instead, I created two LDs, each RAID 1 at 1.5TB a piece. I’ve already lost 1.5TB of usable space here, and I’m not really happy about that, but Windows flips out with any LD over 2 TB, and I plan on dual-booting.

I install Windows 7 and all is well. I throw in the openSUSE 11.1 x64 DVD and attempt to install. It almost finishes the install, and yet grub fails to install the bootloader. It says the cylinders number is over the limit allowed by BIOS.

I’ve always been told in a dual-boot scenario, to install Windows first, and keep Windows as the first partition of the first HDD. Almost all of my programs and data will be in Windows, because I have no problem reading NTFS from Linux. All my games and massive ammounts of data will be on the Windows side.

So I create a 200 gig partition for Linux (easily 150 gigs more than I’ve ever used on a Linux desktop partition), except that means it starts 1.3 TB into the drive, which grub apparently can’t handle.

I’m not sure there is a good workaround, but this brings me to my next question. The GNU team abandoned Grub, and dubbed it Grub Legacy almost 4 years ago. Why is openSUSE still using Grub Legacy, when the actual project has a release about a month ago? I wonder if the newer grub-1.96 release would work, except openSUSE doesn’t have packages for it, and without a boot loader, I can’t even go into openSUSE if I wanted.

I can boot into a LiveCD, but again there is no package for the newer grub.

Given that openSUSE is used as the basis for Novell’s SLED product, I’m pretty sure there are people with massive logical drives. I can’t be the first person to come across this problem.

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IMHO when GRUB tells you the BIOS does not support the bootloader being above a certain limit there is not much GRUB can do about (you misunderstood the error: it is the BIOS, not GRUB, that has the limit).

I had a similar problem (error at GRUB stage 1.5) and ended up creating a small partition at the beginning of the disk for use as /boot in openSUSE. You could then create partition(s) after this one for your windows systems and use the rest to partition for openSUSE. During installation of openSUSE make the first partition /boot.

(Btw in my case that small partition at the start of the disk was already there as the system recovery partition of Windows XP, but we decided that we could live without it).