Error 18

Andre Mangan andremangan at gmail.com
Mon Dec 14 20:56:39 GMT 2009


 The reasons for the error 18 seem to be multiple:

1.  An old BIOS - remedied via a BIOS update.
2.  Hard drive too large and not recognised by the BIOS - I don't know what
can be done about that.
3.  Hard drive recognition - remedied via BIOS setting to "automatic".
4.  A corrupted GRUB - remedied via a GRUB reinstall.
5.  Larger than usual boot and swap partitions - remedied via partition
resizing.

All that seems rather confusing so I would start with point 3 first since it
is the simplest adjustment that you can make.

What confuses the GRUB issue at the moment is that by upgrading from 9.04 to
9.10 you have switched from GRUB1 to GRUB2 and GRUB2 is still a bit of a
dark horse.

A fresh install may fix the problem.

Andre



2009/12/14 Andre Mangan <andremangan at gmail.com>

> From what I can gather, this occurs when GRUB2 in Ubuntu 9.10 has to read
> across 2 drives.  GRUB2 seems to be rather buggy.
>
> I have found that GRUB2 is intolerably slow when reading across 2 hard
> drives.
>
> You may find a solution if you do a clean install of 9.10 - although I
> cannot promise that.
>
> I have abandoned 9.10 (except in VirtualBox and in the Netbook Remix for
> the Eee PCs).
>
> There is plenty about this on the net.
>
> Andre
>
>
>
>
> 2009/12/14 Paul Gear <paul at libertysys.com.au>
>
>>  Chris Taylor wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:58:55 +1000, Paul Gear wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>  Chris Taylor wrote:
>>
>>
>>  I get this message now and again when I start my computer "Error 18
>> Selected cylinders exceeds maximum supported by BIOS. can anyone help
>>
>>
>>     If it only happens intermittently, you may have a hardware problem which
>> causes the hard disk to report the wrong number of cylinders.
>>
>>
>>
>>  Thanks for your input Paul
>> This only started to happen after doing a online upgrade to 9.10 from
>> 9.04.
>>
>> Was thinking of doing clean install with 9.10 any thoughts?
>>
>>  My knowledge on this is not comprehensive, but would expect a clean
>> install to have no effect.  Perhaps a grub reinstall might help, but i doubt
>> that even.
>>
>> Most likely it is something to do with your hardware or BIOS settings.
>> Did you change your SATA settings?  Some BIOSes allow selection of EHCI or
>> ATA emulation, and one might work better than the other for you.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>> --
>>
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>>
>>
>
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