[ale] Hard Drive "boot sector" Question

[JK]

One thing to be aware of is that some older BIOSen can't
recognize the drive geometry of drives over a certain
size (or sometimes they can, but you have to fiddle with
BIOS settings to make it happen).  If you can get into
the machine's BIOS settings screens and run its hard-drive
detection utility, and it doesn't detect the drive or
detects it incorrectly, then this is probably the root
of your problem.

The good news is that the BIOS is only needed in order to
read the bootloader off of the MBR.  Once GRUB and/or
gets running, it doesn't ever use the BIOS again, and
can boot from practically anything in existence.
Therefore, if you can arrange to boot GRUB from a smaller
drive or some other alternative media such as a USB stick,
you can go ahead and USE the big drive as a filesystem.

-- JK


On 5/22/2010 12:05 PM, m-aaron-r wrote:
>
> I'm trying to do a favor for a friend by installing Linux on an older
> (but
> serviceable) Compaq Celeron system of theirs that suffered death
> by windisease.
>
> As delivered the system would fail to boot, though the hard drive seemed
> to be working fine when I pulled it and salvaged their user data by
> hooking
> the drive up as an external disk on my Linux desktop.  I've returned the
> drive to their box and am now trying to install Linux on it using a
> known
> good Live CD copy of Ubuntu 9.10 (erase entire disk and install option).
>
> The installation runs fine and the disk gets re-formatted and written
> to without
> reporting any errors. However, after install completion, the system
> will not
> boot to the hard drive, reporting something like:
> "cannot find device #####-#######-######"
> I ran the install a couple times using both 10.04 and 9.10;  10.04
> provided
> a GRUB shell prompt on one attempt.
>
> I have since run a final test by swapping out the non-booting drive
> with an
> old 20gig spare and have successfully installed and booted the system,
> so it's not the box it's the drive, and apparently only the "boot
> sector" of the
> drive that is the problem.
>
> Is there a way so salvage this drive or re-allocate the failing boot
> sector??
>
> (I'm not keen on handing back a system with an HD of questionable
> size, age and reliability, so I would prefer to salvage the 160 Gig
> original
> hard disk if it's possible to do so with some confidence.)
>
> Suggestions appreciated!
> peace
> aaron
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