Grub useless error 18 after update

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi, this is an error I got on an 11.0 x64 system, which was booting fine. I applied the latest patches on the system (via YAST), and on the reboot … Grub error 18, cylinder beyond the bios limit.

The drive is a 500GB drive. Its on a Gigabyte p45 board quad processor – i.e. its new.

I’ve always hated grub, and this just confirms it to me. A working system it now complains about cylinder limit.

I can’t move the boot partition (since there is just one large partition).

Can anyone can help me please. It also will not boot the previous entry, claiming it can’t find it.

Gparted cd shows the partitions are all there.

I don’t want to reinstall 11.0 (don’t want to risk 11.1)

Thanks.

2

Hi,

I know that there is no reason for this to have changed, but check your bios settings. Look for Large or LBA settings for your hard disk. The bios needs to do some translation for large disks, they have very large cylinder numbers.

Cheers and good luck!

3

I tried every combination.

With auto,lba,chs error 18 appeared during grub startup
with large grub appears, and error 18 appears after selecting the first item.

4

For others who suffer the joys of Grub and its mood swings.

With the assistance of grub page
I copied the boot directory to another drive/partition and then minor edit to the menu.lst to point to the new boot location, it booted up the main system.