Grub error 18

[papawoob]

Hi all, I am not really a noob as I have been using Linux for 2 years now and am a distro junkie, but I fix up old puters and give them to families that do not have one and Puppy is my distro of choice. I have done 49 installs with Puppy and the first 48 went almost flawlessly(nothing I could not figure out). This last 1 returned a "grub error 18" upon reboot. The puter has a 450 PII and a 6 gig hd. I have googled this error and believe I can fix this by making a 100mb "boot" partition but I am unsure of the exact steps to install the part of Puppy I need to install seperate from the rest of Puppy. Any help or guidance on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Papawoob

[rarsa]

What is the partition configuration that you want in this computer?
(Size of the HDD, How many partitions, what do you want to put in each partition)

Normally just putting the files that you can find under /boot/grub are the ones that you need to put at the begining of the HDD.

[papawoob]

Thanks Rarsa, I partitioned hda1(5.5gigs) and hda2(500mb) swap. So if I made a 50mb "boot" partition and moved /boot/grub into it then I should no longer get the grub error 18?

[Ted Dog]

I use the DVD-WR'r to backup my HD, try part1 4.7G(true 4.3GB) then remaining swap.
Backup to DVD

Code: Select all

growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/dev/hda

restore

Code: Select all

dd if=/dev/dvd of=/dev/hda

[Ted Dog]

test the badblocks when formating. my 6G HD crica 1997 is error prone, now retired as a paperweiht

[outcydr]

error 18 has to do with the 1024 cylinder limitation, right?
this might be a bit dated but should help help:
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/gr ... tition.htm

the only thing i might add is that when you make the 1mb partition it will probably round up to 8mb using one complete cylinder

really in a nut shell - just make the partition and use grub install from puppy to install it there and be sure to set the grub partiton active

if this is wrong just shoot me (i AM a newbie) and is as much a question as an answer

[papawoob]

Thanks for the info Ted Dog, I have already tested the hd a couple of times and all is well. I do not have a burner on this machine as it has been scrapped together but a new install only takes about 13 minutes so no big deal.
Thanks Outcyder for the link, I will add it to my other "error 18" links for future reference. I use a dedicated grub on my personal puter as I use 2 hd's with 15 different distros mostly for testing. I will give the 6 gig another shot hopefully this afternoon and will post back success or failure. Thanks all, Papawoob