Worlds biggest booting problem ever

[fearby]

I cannot boot Mandrake 8.0 beta.
1. Grub gives an error message 18: Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS.

2. Booting from boot floppy just produces a message "OS not found".

3. Putting Grub on the linux partition and using Boot Manager to select that partition to boot from just produces the same message as in 1.

Things were fine with Mandrake 7.2 - what can I do??? :mad:

[njcajun]

Sounds to me like your BIOS is not running in LBA mode, which it needs to do if you want to address cylinders above the 1023rd cylinder.

When you install, if this system only has Linux on it, you might consider making a separate /boot partition on /dev/hda1 or whatever the first available partition is. If this is NOT a linux-only machine, and Windoze is installed first, you should be able to tell the install to put LILO on the MBR. Though I've heard some horror stories from newbies about this, I've been setting up dual boots that way for 2 years without any problems. Follow the instructions and you should be fine.

[XxMaCaBrExX]

I think your problem lies in your bootloader software. When the installation asks you which bootloader you would like to install, for God sakes, choose LILO. It now has a menu interface, and works perfectly %99.999562 of the time. ;)

[fearby]

Sounds promising
How can I put LILO on if I can't boot into Linux?
Is it possible to install from Windows or use it from a floppy? :confused:

[XxMaCaBrExX]

restart the installation, choose "Upgrade" then "Expert". then don't chose any packages (since they're already installed anyways) then at the bootloader selection, just choose LILO instead of grub. If you do a custom, or recommended or whatever, I don't think it will work, "Expert" is the way to go. :D