grub, large drives, and old bios

[Sami Haahtinen]

Adam Lydick wrote:
> One of my workstations has a large drive (200GB) and an older bios that
> doesn't seem to support GRUB. (I've only gotten it to work with LILO,
> previously) Thus, the standard warty install fails to boot.
> 
> Could partitioner default to creating a small /boot partition to ensure
> compatibility with somewhat dated systems? I manually partitioned on my
> second try to have a 50MB /boot at the beginning of the disk and
> everything went smoothly (with GRUB).

I recently had to walk (with the marvels of irc) a new user though the 
hoops of creating a small /boot to go around this same problem. The 
problem appears to be that grub actually reads the filetable and does 
the sane thing and refuses to do anything if the partition can't be 
accessed completely.

either creating a /boot partition by default or giving an alternative to 
create /boot per default with some parameter to the installer. this 
would make the instructions a lot simpler than to walk a user through 
the expert installer.

I don't think there are any sane ways of detecting the problems while 
installing.

- S