Bug#450951: grub can't get installed past 1TB

[Samuel Thibault]

Package: grub
Version: 0.97-28
Severity: normal

Hi,

When trying to install grub past 1TB, it fails with error 18 (18 :
Selected cylinder exceeds maximum supported by BIOS).  This is because
the HDIO_GETGEO ioctl is limited to 65535 cylinders (i.e. ~1TB), and
for bigger values Linux just returns 65535.  I'm not sure where the fix
should be done: should the kernel error out when the cylinders don't
fit, or should grub recognize 65535 as a bogus value and compute a fake
geometry by itself?  Or both?

Note: there is another bug in bochs's bios which prevents from testing
with bochs or qemu the patch is available on the bochs list, I'll
probably file a bug against the bochs package too.

Samuel

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.23
Locale: LANG=fr_FR at euro, LC_CTYPE=fr_FR at euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages grub depends on:
ii  libc6                     2.6.1-6        GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libncurses5               5.6+20071013-1 Shared libraries for terminal hand

grub recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information

-- 
Samuel
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