Why... /etc/sysconfig/grub forcelba-[01]

[T. Nifty Hat Mitchell]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 03:51:32AM -0400, Sean Estabrooks wrote:
> On Thu, July 1, 2004 3:13 am, T. Nifty Hat Mitchell said:
> 
> > Why does /etc/sysconfig/grub contain the line:
> >
> >     forcelba=0
> >
> > The default of FC1 and FC2 is the same as far as I can tell.
> >
> > Just curious.
> 
> Hey Tom,
> 
> Been that way since before Fedora was born, since at least RH8 anyway.
> It's used by the "grubby" command to decide how to configure the first
> stage boot loader of grub.   It's only needed on machines that support
> lba, with large disks in them, where the automatic detection of LBA mode
> doesn't work.   This should be a small number of machines and you never
> want to force it in any machine that can't support LBA so its best left
> at zero as a default.

Thanks.

If this has been the configuration state so long I now wonder why it
is not the default.  Perhaps it is and the config file line is simply
good form to tell us what the default is at a level that is hard to
debug.  Yes, that sounds right ;-)

`--force-lba'
     Force GRUB to use LBA mode even for a buggy BIOS. Use this option
     only if your BIOS doesn't work in LBA mode even though it supports
     LBA mode.

Having looked at the above it is good that this is default and 
also good that it is specified.  Time to look harder at the 
grub faq ... http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-faq.html

Anyhow, 
I noticed it because I was looking at the grub stuff in part because I
was wondering why FC2 does not default to the new kernel (default=0)
while FC1 does.  See your /boot/grub/grub.conf.  I like and expect
that the default track forward to the latest kernel and it no longer
seems to.


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