Booting problem with old HD

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

vinod gullu wrote:
> Dear All,
> I had a Laptop which died a month ago. So i took out
> the LAptop HD and connected it to my desktop through
> USB. During boot setup i enabled boot USB as 1st
> option. 
> Now The grub menu comes but without background splash
> image . Also If i choose to boot linux or windows. A
> error message comes
> 
> ERROR 18:   selected cylinder length exceeds the max
> supported by BIOS.
> 
> I even changed the grub.conf by modifying hd0 to hd1
> as fdisk -l recognises it as sdb. But again same
> message.
> 
> Can anyone help me to sort out the issue as i want to
> boot the LAPTOP HD for most of my work.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> 
It sounds like the disk geometry is being seen differently when it
is in the USB enclosure. The errors sound like the drive was not
being accessed using LBA when in the laptop, and is being accessed
that way now. I am not sure how to turn LBA off when using a USB
enclosure. There may be an option you can use to do that in your
BIOS, but I don't remember ever seeing one. There may be a way to
tell Grub not to use LBA, but I have never needed it, so I don't know.

Can you mount the partitions on the drive from Linux? If you can,
and you can read the files without any problems, then you may be
able to re-install Grub on the drive. Because Grub uses BIOS calls
to access the drive, the BIOS and Grub must agree on how the drive
is mapped.

Once you get Grub working, you troubles are not over. Windows is not
going to boot off the USB drive. As far as I know, there isn't any
way to get Windows to do that, but I could be wrong. At the very
least, you will have to change the registry because Windows will be
loading the wrong drivers to access the drive. You may be able to
get it to boot in the safe mode...

You will probably also have to build a new initrd for Linux. Unless
the usb_storage module, and the USB drivers are in the initrd, Linux
will not be able to mount the root file system.

You would probably find it a lot less trouble to get an adapter that
lets you use the laptop hard drive as a standard PATA drive, and
install the drive in your desktop. You can find the kits with the
mounting rails and an adapter board for less then $10 US.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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