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Thread ID: 87376	2008-02-19 01:36:00	Booting from large hdd	soupaman (12942)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
641869	2008-02-19 01:36:00	Hi, I have an HP nx6320 laptop with a 500gb external hdd. I have just installed ubuntu 7.10 on the external disk to test it before upgrading from 7.4 on the internal disk. The external disk has an initial 470gb NTFS data partition and and the remaining 30gb is ext3/swap for ubuntu. However it appears the hdd is too big for the bios to boot from. If I try to boot directly from the external the boot process hangs. I then tried using command line GRUB on my internal drive to manually go through the boot process to figure out where the problem was. If I ask GRUB to explore the external disk it picks up the NTFS partition but then tells me that the hdd size exceeds BIOS limits. (a similar error occurs when trying to set root to (hd1,1)) Can anyone think of a way around this?? The only way I thought of was to move the NTFS partition to the end of the disk and the Ubuntu partition to the front however gParted was going to take upwards of 24hrs to do this so I cancelled.	soupaman (12942)
641870	2008-02-19 20:21:00	I know when using the much older LILO boot loader, you had to put the boot partition on the first 1024 cylinders of the disk (ie. near the beginning). You will probably need to either move the NTFS partition or create a boot partition on the lappy HDD.	autechre (266)
641871	2008-02-19 20:38:00	As autechre said, make sure that grub lives somewhere within the first 1024 sectors of the disk. Note that there is a lot more to grub than just what lives in the MBR - the MBR only contains enough to start loading the rest of grub from elsewhere on the disk. And yes, moving the NTFS partition is the only way to do this, however you don't need to move it all the way to the end - just enough to sneak in a boot partition is fine. 100MB should be more than enough, you are unlikely to ever install enough kernel junk to fill that space. Alternatively, you can try forcing grub to address a larger disk area, however this doesn't always work. Worth a shot though ;-)	Erayd (23)
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