[conspire] my apologies to grub2

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bruce Coston (jane_ikari at yahoo.com):

> It's stunningly easy to forget that my most recent and powerful box
> has the dumb bios limit about hard drives . 

There have been a series of BIOS limits over the years.

The one that was an issue for a long time was one that prevented
addressing over 1024 logical cylinders during the boot process.  That
was when many of us got in the habit of putting a small /boot partition
near the outer edges of the disc, first in partition order (i.e.,
dev/sda1).  That ensured that all contents required for booting right up
through the boot kernel image and the initrd were within the first 1024
logical cylinders.

You're probably referring to the more recent 137GB (128GiB) limit, which
is a problem for GRUB2 because (by default) it relies on BIOS calls.

(I hear that you can make GRUB2 _bypass_ BIOS functionality, e.g:
grub-install --disk-module=ata )

Same compensatory remedy applies:  If you have a BIOS thus limited, put
the bootable stuff in the outer parts of the disc, within the first
137GB.  That's the Keep It Simple solution.  Other workarounds also
exist.