Re: Error 18 : Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

At Sun, 30 Dec 2001 16:43:04 -0500,
Daniel Freedman wrote:
> Wow!  This latest CVS (checked out only a few hours after my last) now
> works perfectly, and reproducibly so, at least in my configuration.

That's fantastic!

> Just out of curiosity, were you fixing this before my bug-report or
> did that trigger something?

I'm not sure. Perhaps the answer is no. I was investigating a minor
bug which happened on my PC at that time. As that was quite boring, I
sometimes read e-mail coming to my mailbox while debugging the
bug. After all, I didn't fix the bug, but I added a workaround for a
bug written in the Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, instead. Your report
may signal me to take a look at the list.

> And I guess it ended up being some form
> of timer issue in GRUB?

No. It was because of an uninitialized variable. This is not bad for
sane BIOSes, but affects some buggy BIOSes. Because GRUB allocates the
variable on the stack, it is possible that the variable is set to zero
with no initialization by chance.

> Though it doesn't now effect me, just for my
> future info, should GRUB be able to boot from a partition located at
> any location on the drive (ie 40GB, 60GB high, etc.) assuming correct
> (LBA) BIOS information?

Yes. Otherwise, send a bug report, please. ;)

Thanks,
Okuji