In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you write:
>> You misunderstand the requirement. Stage 2 does not need to be fit
>>in the first cylinder, but it must be represented as less than 8
>>block-lists. When installing GRUB, GRUB attempts to collect contiguous
>>blocks into one entry, so if your HDD is not fragmented, there is no
>>problem. The reason why I recommended to use Stage 1.5 is that Stage
>>1.5 is just much smaller than Stage 2, but not that Stage 1.5 is fit
>>in the first cylinder.
>
>Hmmm. Thanks for detailed explanation. Let me understand it much
>clearer. Is there any restriction of the place of stage1.5 or stage2?
>
>I may still misunderstand but I think stage1 loads stage1.5 or stage2
>in real mode using BIOS code. So I think stage1.5 or stage2 should be
>exist in the first 1024 cylinder area. If I can't use first large
>partition (bigger than 1024 cylinder) due to some reason then last
>resort for storing stage1.5 or stage2 is the first cylinder area.
>stage2 is fat then I use stage1.5 for booting stage2 from second
>partition area.
Thats right. In fact, even the operating systems booted by stage2 still
have to be within the first 1024 cylinders.
I've just been bitten by this, and over the last few nights have been
rearranging the partitions on my disk. Even with 63/255 cyls/hds LBE,
disk sizes now are too large for more than the first half to fit, and
my spare partitions were in the second half! ( I still harbour the
ambition that one day I just might get far enough to start playing
with the hurd. That /will/ happen one day. But not today. )
Anyway, I think that stage 1.5 /is/ really valuable, because it can eliminate
the somewhat booby trapped situation of having the boot loader depend on
absolute sector positions of a file within a filing system that one doesn't
have any guarantees about. What is to stop a newby running a defragmenter
on their partition where the boot loader lives?
The standard installed setup should be with a stage 1.5 on the first
cylinder. Perhaps we could even afford to have a very simple fallback
prompt that stage 1.5 used if it didn't find stage 2, to let people type
in a replacement path.
