Bug#532202: grub-pc: behaves strange in virtualbox with a disk > 2 TB

[Marc Haber]

Package: grub-pc
Version: 1.96+20090603-1
Severity: normal

Hi,

I am trying to use grub2 to loopback boot an grml .iso file which is
stored on a 1000 cylinder partition on a 4 TB hard disk in virtualbox.
my grub configuration is the second one visible in
http://blog.zugschlus.de/archives/825-grml-als-eigenes-Rescuesystem.html.

This fails in two "interesting" ways:

When I simply hit enter on the grub menu, I get "you need to load the
kernel first", and when I hit "e" afterwards, I only see the "loopback
oop (hd0,1)/grml/grml-small_2009.05.iso" line, neither the linux nor
the initrd line.

When I directly go into "e" before actually trying to boot, I see the
full configuration, and Ctrl-X gets me to an "invalid magic number"
error message.

When I try the same (identically configured grub2 on a 1000 cylinder
partition) on a 1 TB hard disk, everything is just fine.

I do not know whether this is an issue with the virtualbox "BIOS" or
with grub2, and I do not have any real hardware with a disk that big,
but grub 2's behavior depending on whether I try to boot straight or
try to edit things first is interesting.

The virtual hard disk .vdi file which can be used to reproduce this
with virtualbox-ose 2.2.4 from Unstable is 1.2 G uncompressed and 92 M
bz2 compressed, so it would be possible to upload the compressed image
to some server if you want to see it yourself.

Greetings
Marc

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

Kernel: Linux 2.6.29.4-zgsrv20080 (SMP w/1 CPU core; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash