Grub failures

[Kam Leo]

On 3/30/07, Jeff Mutonho <ejbengine at gmail.com> wrote:
> Grub is failing with the error message :
>
> Grub loading stage 1.5.
> .......
> ..
> Error 5
>
>
> I checked what error 5 means and the docs say :
>
>
> 5 : "Disk geometry error"
>
>  This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block
> address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area.  This generally
> happens if your disk is larger than the BIOS can handle (512MB for
> (E)IDE disks on older machines or larger than 8GB in general).
>
>
> Why is this happening all of sudden when everything was working ?The
> machine is a dual boot with XP on the other partition.
> Last week I had another Grub failure at stage 2 , and fixed it by
> booting into recovery mode and doing :
>
> grub
> grub>root (hd1,0)
> grub>setup (hd0)
> grub>quit
>
> then rebooted.What could be causing Grub to have these intermittent
> failures?I haven't touched the BIOS.
>

A quick guess would be that your XP installation is mucking with the
MBR and trying to "repair" it. Check the list or search the web for
how to dual boot from Windows.

>
> "Don't take the name of root in vain."
>
> Jeff  Mutonho
> Cape Town
> South Africa