Alternative booting

[David Krings]

Chris Jones wrote:
>> I meant that more down the line of saving the hassle with two
>> bootloaders on a dual-boot box. Not that the one does anything
>> better/different/worse than the other. IMHO both are gosh darn stupid.
>> All these isssues shouldn't even exist.
> 
> Yeah, but the problem is nothing to do with the bootloader. Its the *bios* 
> that cannot access past a certain part of the disk.
> 
> Also, the problem is only on older systems that cannot access below cylinder 
> 1024 - Newer systems can. These older bioses come from the days when 8Gig 
> disks (roughly what the 1024 cylinder gives you) where considered so huge 
> that such a limit wasn't considered a problem.  Assumptions like this always 
> come back.
> 
> So this is problem *has* already been fixed. If you have a newer system you 
> are fine. If not, well you just have to but your /boot before the 1024 
> cylinder - no big deal.

So how come that on my brand new system this appears to be an issue? I 
use a SATA controller and I am convinced that there isn't a single 
native SATA drive of less than 8G capacity.
Also, my first partition is for XP and 30G, so if 8G is the magic limit 
then how come that GRUB booted fine several times with that setup? 
Again, I am very sure that I am not victim of any BIOS limitations, but 
that GRUB does one thing five times in a row as expected and just 
doesn't do it a sixth time around for reasons unknown. And that is not 
the worst part, I cannot even revive it without intimiate knowledge of 
settings that I didn't have a say over, such as what the RAID array is 
named under /mapper. I would have given it a much better name...such as 
'raid'.

I try OpenSuSE next, not that I expect it to be vastly superior, but 
maybe it just works consistently.

David