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Windows ME (Sep 2000) / Re: understanding the 1024 cylinder boundary
« Last post by dawful on Today at 10:07:12 PM »Warning
The following may not be useful in any way!
I have some machines that can't decide how to behave, CHS or LBA. Sometimes it affects IDE drives, but most often this causes problems with USB drives. Especially, if you want to boot from them. The machines, I am describing, are much newer then the ones being discussed in this thread. And sometimes issues similar to mine, are actually the USB drive being accessed as a USB Zip drive (instead of a USB harddrive/memory stick).
The reason I mention it at all, is that I have occasionally used Grub2, to bypass buggy bios drive access. It has been a long time since I've owned a machine, that only understands CHS. I wonder if Grub2 can help bypass this issue, too.
Grub2 will use your bios drivers, but can load its own drivers. Once, those drivers are loaded, booting options become more flexible. Another similar tool is Grub4Dos. You can remap your partitions, load a partition to ram, boot a floppy disk from a disk image on your harddrive, etc.
I don't know if either can bypass the 1024 limit. I just haven't looked into it. And both Grub2/Grub4Dos are less then user friendly. Also, there isn't a good manual for either. Grub2 has better documentation; but some things you don't learn, without scavenging endless mailing lists and forums. Grub4Dos almost needs to be learned totally off of forum discussions.