Partitioner automatic schemes don't work where the BIOS won't boot off a cylinder >1024

[Ross Younger]

I was attempting to install Breezy on an old Pentium 133. I had completely forgotten about the boot-time 1024 cylinder limit imposed by PC BIOSes of that age and just told the partitioner to do its stuff automatically.

It didn't warn me or cue me at all that there might be a problem; I didn't realise until after the installer rebooted and grub choked with error 18. (Back in the days when installing Linux involved a tool which ran fdisk and LILO interactively, there was at least a warning that having the root partition that large was a bad idea.)

It would be ideal if the installer's partition editor's automatic mode on i386 could somehow detect whether the BIOS had this limitation; if that isn't possible, it would at least be a decent heuristic to notice from the processor type in /proc/cpuinfo that the system was quite old and likely to be affected and the user asked (" ... and if you don't know whether this applies to you, say <the safe answer>"). If the system is detected as being affected or the user says "yes, do it the safe way", then the partitioner should create a smallish /boot as partition 1 in addition to whatever it was going to do.

(I worked around the problem today by rebooting back to the installer - itself not a trivial feat because that machine doesn't know how to boot off CDs - and starting from scratch, this time partitioning by hand.)

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Might be a dup of bug #9006

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

(by the way, the fluke case might be being seen in bug #79578 )

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

arg that last comment went ot the wrong bug : )

[Ross Younger (0ryoungerk-ubuntu)]

Agreed, looks to me like a dupe of #9006.