map & FAT32

[Ciprian Popovici]

I seem to have got a problem that was reported by at least 2 other
people on this mailing list, as I discovered in the archives. They got
no answers whatsoever though, I believe.

I have two hard-disks, one on ide0 and one on ide1. Grub is installed
on ide1 and BIOS is instructed to boot it. On the first (ide0)
hard-disk I have a primary FAT32 partition used to boot Windows 98 and
an extended partition containing a second FAT32 partition.

I'm using the "classical" chainloading scheme:
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot

I can boot OK, but the second partition becomes unusable. fdisk
reports it as an "unknown" type instead of 0xb as it would be normal.

Booting the first hard-disk directly works OK.

I suspect this has something to do with bug 486:
http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailbug&bug_id=486&group_id=68
but I found the description rather vague so I'm not sure.

It comes down to: I have to use map to be able to boot, but it will
render some partitions unusable. Am I correct?

I'd also appreciate some enlightment on the internals here. Why does
this happen? Does Grub report a modified partition table to the OS or
what?

-- Ciprian Popovici