grub Error 23 'Selected Disk Does Not Exist' - but it does!

[Scott Burns]

Bill Dearborn wrote:

>Attempts to get by the GRUB and blinking cursor all failed. With all
>references but the DOS boot menu commented out we still were halted after
>the word GRUB appeared on the monitor.
>
>Within the BIOS there is no listing for the geometry of the Hard Drives.
>PlugNPlay appears to have identified my Maxtor 120 and WDC 250 drives, but
>there are no listings visible for the Cylinder, Head, Sector counts.
>  
>
Is there a listing for "Normal", "Large" or "LBA" - you need LBA

>Using linux rescue  & sfdisk -l revealed that my hd0 has a Geometry of
>14946, 255, 63 while the missing disk as far as GRUB is concerned has the
>figures 30401, 255, 63. Linux appears to be able to discover the disks and
>to get the information correct. Is there any place within the Linux files
>where anaconda would have written what it found as the drive geometry? I
>know anaconda identified both disks since it wrote a device.map file to the
>/boot/grub directory which identified (fd0) as /dev/fd0; (hd0) as /dev/hda
>and (hd1) as /dev/hdb 
>
>More discoveries: after loading grub via the floppy disk, I issued the
>command 'geometry (hd1)' and still received the Error 23, then I did used
>the same command on (hd0) and received the following: 1023/255/63 - which is
>completely wrong and represents a 240 Meg drive. If I understand this
>correctly GRUB is confused.
>  
>
Grub believes the BIOS.  If the BIOS is a bit confused, so is GRUB.

>So as a newbie I am wondering where to turn next ... Do I need to attempt to
>find a way to re-install GRUB which appears to NOT understand my machine?
>Are there other options? Is the GRUB setup command the way to go?
>  
>
A long shot, but can you include your grub.conf?

I had a quick google and found references to problems with over 137GB 
disks.  If so, the grub places might be a better place to ask for help.


Scott