Re: EZ-Drive weirdness

[Jochen Hoenicke]

On Mar 3, Alexis Paul Musgrave wrote:
> 
> I have a buggy bios, and thus require EZ-Drive to use my large(r) hard
> drive. However, there are some difficulties with this.
> 
> At the moment I am booting grub via floppy disk, to do this, I have to
> wait for EZ-Drive to load, then from EZ-Drive, boot the floppy.
> 
> If I attempt to boot without EZD, the partitions on the drive are not
> recognised, and thus, i cannot boot.
> 
> The situation is no better if I attempt to write grub to mbr as then
> EZB is still erased, and I am unable to boot.

The problem is that grub embeds stage1_5 after the MBR not knowing
that this space is used by EZ-BIOS.  The real MBR where the first part
of EZ-BIOS resides is not affected, since EZ-BIOS redirect all
read/write accesses to a different sector.

> Does anyone know of a solution to this ?

Only the CVS version of grub has EZ-Drive support: It can access the
hard disk without EZD loaded (but not beyond the 1024 cylinder
boundary).  And that version of grub makes sure that it doesn't
overwrite EZ when it is installed in MBR.

If you don't want to upgrade, you can install grub to a primary linux
partition and activate that partition.  Or do it the hard way: install
grub manually to the MBR using it's "install" command (difficult
syntax) instead of setup.  Do not embed stage1_5.

> I have no problems installing lilo on the same setup, so what is the
> issue ?

Grub embeds its stage1_5 after the MBR in the same space EZ-BIOS
uses.  

  Jochen