update-grub help

[Dave Howorth]

Goh Lip wrote:
> Dave, more information always better than less. With this new 
> information, unfortunately, I have some bad news.
> 
> There is a bug due to the size limitation of Bios but that was fixed in 
> ubuntu, maybe it wasn't fixed in opensuse. Refer
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/grub2/+bug/403408
> 
> Please handle some suggestions on forums carefully. There are some posts 
> on this in the ubuntu forums, but with this being resolved, the methods 
> recommended are no longer valid. If this problem happens in ubuntu, I'd 
> recommend you go to the launchpad bug report to seek a solution or 
> report this bug. But since this happens in your opensuse OS, I would 
> recommend you check with the suse technical list.

I'm not sure how that bug applies. The problem I have AIUI is that grub2
is not able to access the 'sdf' drive. ls does not list it at all, so no
amount of searching finds any partitions or files on it.

I don't think suse is relevant since none of the suse code (or the suse
grub1) is even close to running at this point. It's all the grub2 that
came with Ubuntu.

> In short, the recommendations (before the fix) were
> 
> o grub-install --disk-module=ata
>    if it does not work , just grub-install back

I wondered about trying the ata module but wasn't sure whether it might
break grub. Is there any documentation for it?  I'll give it a try.

> o set up the /boot partition (of your suse) closer to the 'front' of the 
> hard disk.

If I thought grub was even finding the disk, I'd try this :)

> o removing the "search xxxxxxxx" line. Yes, you've googled correctly, 
> but you should have told us about the bios not reading the the suse 
> partition, hence grub not being able to read the partition.

If I'd known earlier, I would have told you earlier :)

But again, please note that this is not a problem with being able to
read a partition, it's a problem with accessing the disk at all.

> Dave, I would not be able to help you any further other than the above; 
> I hope Tom and others could help you further.

No worries. Thanks for your help so far,
Dave