Bug#530357: grub-common: still really mystified problems with / not visible to BIOS

[Arthur Marsh]

Package: grub-common
Version: 1.96+20090523-1
Severity: normal


Firstly, the configuration that causes problems is with having a 300 GiB
hard disk on a machine where the BIOS only recognises the first 32 GiB
or 1024 cylinders of the disk, and the disk being partitioned into a 
/boot partition on the first 1024 cylinders, then / (and separate swap 
and vfat partitions as well).

With grub 20090317, I had no problems.

With grub 20090523, the default entry fails to boot, then I can edit
a command line to omit the "search" line and can boot.

If I comment out the "search" line in the default entry in 
/boot/grub/grub.cfg, that entry again fails to boot, but I can edit
another entry and remove the "search" line then boot alright.

I've tried using ata instead of biosdisk using a hacked version of 
grub-install:

/usr/sbin$ diff grub-install grub-install.new
240a241
>
257c258
<     modules="$modules biosdisk"
---
>     modules="$modules ata"
270c271
<     grub_drive="`$grub_probe --target=drive --device ${grub_device}`"
---
>     grub_drive="`$grub_probe --target=drive --device ${grub_device}|sed -e 's/hd/ata/'`"

but again I can't boot automatically into GNU/Linux. 

It appears that the environment where I edit an existing /boot/grub/grub.cfg
entry is different to what attempts to boot a default /boot/grub.cfg entry.

I would *really* appreciate any clues to know how to narrow down the source
of these problems. Some debugging output of the boot process would help.

Regards,

Arthur Marsh.

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

Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-rc7 (SMP w/1 CPU core; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages grub-common depends on:
ii  base-files             5.0.0             Debian base system miscellaneous f
ii  libc6                  2.9-13            GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libfreetype6           2.3.9-4.1         FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii  libncurses5            5.7+20090523-1    shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  zlib1g                 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-13 compression library - runtime

grub-common recommends no packages.

Versions of packages grub-common suggests:
pn  multiboot-doc                 <none>     (no description available)

-- debconf-show failed