During the “Installation Overview” I see this message in red:
The bootloader is installed on a partition that does not lie entirely below 128 GB. The system might not boot if BIOS support only lba4 (result is error 18 during install grub MBR.)
How can I remedy this?
The background of my problems is below:
I have been having major boot issues after trying to update my perfectly working for many months Ubuntu 11.04 on my Toshiba netbook. I had had it installed within Windows 7 but when I was no longer able to boot properly after updating I decided to try to install 11.10 directly without WUBI. I still could not boot properly. (It would go to (initramfs) - and while I would eventually be able to force it to load, I wanted it to be able to start properly.) I then installed Linux Mint and had same boot issues.
I had so many boot issues I ended up getting a new empty harddrive for it and yesterday installed Kubuntu 11.10 from a CD while not connected to the net. After installing and connecting by WiFi, I installed a lot of software and also changed the desktop image. It seemed to be working fine but when I went to update it, and tried to restart it, it hung at “preparing to configure plasma-widgets-workspace”. I tried to restart it and I could type in my password but the mouse no longer would work. I tried again to restart it - mouse wouldn’t work. I reinstalled it, but when it came time to log in, the mouse still wouldn’t work.
So I decided to try installing Ubuntu 11.10 via a CD. I was able to get the net connection at the beginning of the installation. But near the beginning of the installation I saw something like “saving configuration files.” (Unfortunately I did not write down what it said - though at the time googled it. Found something that made it sound like doing the install without being connected to the net would help the problem. So I tried another install, this time without being connected to the net. Same thing happened.)
So - I decided to burn a DVD for openSUSE. I’ve just been trying to install it. During the “Installation Overview” I see in red this message:
The bootloader is installed on a partition that does not lie entirely below 128 GB. The system might not boot if BIOS support only lba4 (result is error 18 during install grub MBR.)
For booting, installation settings say:
Boot loader type GRUB
Satatus location /dev/sda3 ("/")
Change location
Boot from MBR is disabled.
Boot from “/” partition is enabled.
Sections:
openSUSE 12.1 (default)
Failsafe - openSUSE 12.1
BTW - when I searched on “bootloader is installed on a partition that does not lie entirely below 128 GB”
I was asked: Did you mean: brother is installed on a partition that does not live entirely below 128 GB
The message you see is only a warning. It depends on your BIOS if it is applicable or not. And that depends on the system itself of course. The question is do you realy get that GRUB error 18 on booting the installed system? That would be the best test. I guess you still have (and want) multi boot with Windows. To get an idea about your disk layout at the moment, the output of
fdisk -l
would be interesting.
Maybe others can give you an easy way to test if the BIOS has or hasn’t that lba4 thing.
The message you see is only a warning. It depends on your BIOS if it is applicable or not. And that depends on the system itself of course. The question is do you realy get that GRUB error 18 on booting the installed system? That would be the best test.
I guess I’ll try to go ahead with the installation. I hesitated to do so because of all the issues I had been having trying to boot the various things I’d been trying to install, and thought this message from the openSUSE install might be indicative of some underlying problem.
I guess you still have (and want) multi boot with Windows.
Well, only when I put back into the netbook the original drive which has Win7 on it.
To get an idea about your disk layout at the moment, the output of
fdisk -l
would be interesting.
I don’t see how I could do this as nothing is currently installed on the computer.
I guess I’ll just go ahead and let the install continue and see what happens.
When you install and there is are no Windows partitions (or others) on the disk you want to install on, then my guess would be that, after from the swap partition, the root partition (where you are going to boot would be the second on the disk and thus certainly lower then 128GB (except when you want an 128GB Swap space ).
You then choose the “use whole disk” option in the installer and it will offer you a partitioning which erases all existing partitions and creating Swap,* /* and* /home* all with reasonable size.
Yes, it is allways better to start every single problem in a new thread in the most fitting (sub)forum and with a title that will draw the attention of those who knopw more about the subject.
).