Field Notes: GRUB 1024 cylinder limit

So, I was at a customer site last month and had to quickly install and dual-boot SLES 10 SP2. Long story short, I hit the GRUB 1024 cylinder limit. I was able to install SLES 10 SP2 but GRUB installation semi-fail at stage 2. The result is SLES 10 SP2 got installed but I cannot boot into it.

Thankfully, we are able to create a small partition for /boot to reside within the 1024 cylinder limit of the hard disk drive. Thus, we can successfully boot up SLES 10 SP2 and get on with the programme.

According to a few online resources, I should not encounter this challenge as most new computers have BIOs that allows GRUB to reach beyond the 1024 cylinder limit. Oh well...

Here are some links:

• HOWTO GRUB BOOTLOADER AND TROUBLE-SHOOTER - do a search on the page "1024".
• GRUB bootloader - Full Tutorial by Dedoimedo - look under the Introduction section.