Drive Geometry prob - and fix

[Zotter]

OK, I'm *not* dual booting. Just FC2. Whatever they've done with the 2.6 geometry code detection/translation/hashings has FUBAR'd this puppy beyond use. Apprently this issue isn't being seen by users of the current 2.6 kernel. This looks to have been fixed months ago and didn't make it into FC2 - yet. See article at the end here for details. Or I'm just not seeing what I think I'm finding... (wouldn't be the first time)

P-III 500 - 1999 BIOS (flashed to a mid 2000 version later on) - 2 Hard drives, 10GB and 80GB.
/dev/hda is 10GB drive and is dedicated to /boot and swap - nothing else.
/dev/hdb is 80GB and has everything else on it.
Brand new FC2 install, grub is installed to MBR on hda. On boot all I get is a grub shell. Tossed a few geo commands to see what's going on:
grub>geometry (hd0)
drive 0x80: C/H/S = 512/32/63, The number of sectors = 1032192, LBA
Partition num : 0, Filesystem type is ext2fs, partition type 0x83
Partition num : 1,
Error 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

After a moment of WTF?? I check the BIOS settings. Sure enough - they're now set to: 512/32/63. Something on boot up is resetting the BIOS to values that don't make any sense. So, I re-detect the drive, save the correct geometry into BIOS and boot again. Same results.

::SIGH::

Try again at the grub shell to see what's up, but this time feeding grub the correct geometry.

grub> geometry (hd0) 1024 768 63

Same exact dang-blasted frustrating result as detailed above.

Just to be sure I wasen't be'n prank'd, pulled the GPG key from fedora.redhat.com - again, re-verified that the md5sums I have are legit. Re-verified the iso md5s - even did the mediacheck after burning - twice - all OK. It just flat out dosen't work with large drives on an older BIOS.

FWIW - this same hardware was working perfectly under FC1 - 2.4 kernel yum'd to latest.

I'm amazed this was released like this. Coupled with the dual boot "Destroy your W2K/XP install" feature - this is disasterous. I mean, I know we're the 'development' lab-rats for Redhat - but come on. Most labs at least feed and water their test subjects - maybe even a T-shirt, or some cedar shreddings...

Here's an article Google Cache Article that describes what appears to be this same problem and the fix for it that was submitted to the kernel devel folks some time ago.


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And my fix?? Well - apparently not really a 'fix' and certainly not what was listed above as a 'fix', apparnlty just a work-around. After completing what appearsto be a normal and successful, clean install - re-boot the sysetm. Same problem rears it's head as expected. Now, go into BIOS setup and after re-auto-detecting the boot drive's geometry, I choose an option that did *NOT* use LBA. Yes - redetect and choose *AFTER* the succesful insatll w/ drives set to use LBA, but choose a non-LBA geometry.

FC2 came up all smiley and functional. I'm have'n a blast now!!

Just curious if this behavior really is related to the bug/fix mentioned in that google article or not.

[z1xq]

This has made me wonder if it is intentional due to this widespread problem being so well documented and no fix even hinted at. I mean come on, if you want games you need Windows as well. The lack of interoperability reminds me of Microsoft products. This is the third time I have dealt with this starting with FC2-test 1. I will be staying far away from this "lab rat" distro from now on. All I have seen is poor production standards from Fedora. A pretty GUI don't make up for a shoddily designed and extremely poorly implemented pos distro like this one. When it happened with test I thought "well it is a test and there are bugs", but with a final release there is no excuse but sheer not caring.

[siwoods]

Setting up a PC I've screwed together from various bits for my daughter who has older Win 95/98 games and wants the games on FC2 as well so off I went to configure a happy dual boot.

Disaster strikes! The PC is an AMD Athlon 1800+ and sure enough got the end, rebooted and wollop, FC2 OK, Windows 98 stuffed.

Have collected all the tips from the forum and Bugzilla and will have a crack at sorting it later. My point is this:

I've worked in the middle ground between programmers and business users for the past 15 years and I'm getting really excited about what LINUX will be able to do for users in the future. I intend being an advocate for Open Source in corporate life and fundamental issues like this will not help our cause. Red Hat will probably say "you need our commercial products" but that defeats the object, especially for small/medium sized businesses who need cheap, solid systems. It would be a shame to force people down the FreeBSD (or other distro) route when there has been so much effort making FC2 look so professional.

I have not lost my faith and am proud to support this work - on to FC3!

Si Woods

[wayneman]

I'd just like to point out for anyone searching this topic:

There is a workaround available that will allow you to dual boot with Windows XP and Fedora Core 2 release. In my case, Fedora would boot but windows would not. My last hope was a workaround I found on a web page that suggested passing your disk geometry information as a kernal parameter to the GRUB boot loader during Fedora installation. This worked for me...