Error 18 : Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

[Daniel Freedman]

Hi,

I've just made a grub boot floppy that is, so far, doing a much nicer
job of booting multiple Linux distros (and multiple kernels for each)
all from my one hard drive than I could every coerce Lilo to do.  I'm
having only one problem.  I'm occasionally getting the following error
when trying to boot the distribution/kernel that is on /dev/hda16:

18 : Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

>From the Grub manual;
  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).

Now, my /dev/hda16 starts at cylinder 1379 (where the drive has 255
heads, 63 sectors, 1653 cylinders), so this is well over the 8.4GB
mark.  My BIOS is as up-to-date as available and supports LBA.  I've
tried this with both the official GNU Grub 0.90 release as well as
today's tip of the CVS tree.  My exact commands (for the different
kernels on this partition) were:
  root (hd0,15)
  kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda16
  boot
AND
  root (hd0,15)
  kernel /vmlinuz.old root=/dev/hda16
  initrd /initrd.img
  boot

I wouldn't be at all particularly suprised from the above error
explanation if my boot attempt for this partition didn't work at all.
However, the really confusing or disturbing thing is that it sometimes
work perfectly fine and completely boots from this partition, yet
sometimes doesn't work and fails with the above message.  And, worse,
try as I might I can't find any type of reproducibility in it (the
only clue seems to be that I can seem to coerce grub to better
recognize this partition if I give it a 'geometry (hd0)' on the
command line beforehand).  Also, it's never worked from this partition
when automated from a menu, but can be made to work by entering the
exact same commands from the grub command line.  Seems strange to
me...

Also, when it works with this partition, I've had it work both with
plain a kernel (2.2.20) and a kernel and initrd together (2.4.16), as
above.  I searched the grub mail archive, and while I could find
information on LBA issues in general, I never found something like
this.  Sorry if it's been addressed before and I missed it.

Thanks for any advice and Happy New Year, everyone!

Take care,
Daniel


PS Kindly cc: me on replies.

-- 
Daniel A. Freedman
Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics
Department of Physics
Cornell University