Grub failures

[Jeff Mutonho]

Grub is failing with the error message :

Grub loading stage 1.5.
.......
..
Error 5

I checked what error 5 means and the docs say :

5 : "Disk geometry error"

This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block
address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area.  This generally
happens if your disk is larger than the BIOS can handle (512MB for
(E)IDE disks on older machines or larger than 8GB in general).

Why is this happening all of sudden when everything was working ?The
machine is a dual boot with XP on the other partition.
Last week I had another Grub failure at stage 2 , and fixed it by
booting into recovery mode and doing :

grub
grub>root (hd1,0)
grub>setup (hd0)
grub>quit

then rebooted.What could be causing Grub to have these intermittent
failures?I haven't touched the BIOS.

[Kam Leo]

On 3/30/07, Jeff Mutonho  wrote:
> Grub is failing with the error message :
>
> Grub loading stage 1.5.
> .......
> ..
> Error 5
>
> I checked what error 5 means and the docs say :
>
> 5 : "Disk geometry error"
>
> This error is returned when a read is attempted at a linear block
> address beyond the end of the BIOS translated area.  This generally
> happens if your disk is larger than the BIOS can handle (512MB for
> (E)IDE disks on older machines or larger than 8GB in general).
>
> Why is this happening all of sudden when everything was working ?The
> machine is a dual boot with XP on the other partition.
> Last week I had another Grub failure at stage 2 , and fixed it by
> booting into recovery mode and doing :
>
> grub
> grub>root (hd1,0)
> grub>setup (hd0)
> grub>quit
>
> then rebooted.What could be causing Grub to have these intermittent
> failures?I haven't touched the BIOS.

A quick guess would be that your XP installation is mucking with the
MBR and trying to "repair" it. Check the list or search the web for
how to dual boot from Windows.
> "Don't take the name of root in vain."
>
> Jeff  Mutonho
> Cape Town
> South Africa

[Jeff Mutonho]

On 3/31/07, Kam Leo  wrote:
> A quick guess would be that your XP installation is mucking with the
> MBR and trying to "repair" it. Check the list or search the web for
> how to dual boot from Windows.

Dual booting is working as I mentioned in my initial post :) .It's
just that I'm getting these GRUB errors from time to time.This one
seems to have resolved itself ...after I booted into XP using a boot
disc , then rebooted , I got the GRUB menu , and booted successfully
into linux.Strange...but then again , the things we don't understand
always seem strange :)