[vox-tech] Help - Grub error 21

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Chris Jenks (jenks at resonance.org):

>   I can sure sympathize. I just got through "playing" with my Dad's 
> system, with Debian on the primary master and WinXP on the secondary 
> master. He is leery of getting stuck in Linux, so being unable to boot 
> Linux for several months didn't help! The symptoms were, using a recent 
> install of Sarge from CD, that grub would repeat "GRUB GRUB ...", or LILO 
> would give "L 99 99..." or "L 02 02..." depending on whether I reran lilo. 
> The fix was to go into the bios and change the setting for the primary 
> master (containing Linux) from "auto" to "user", which caused the setting 
> for the number of heads for the disk to change from 16 (I think) to 255, 
> and reduced the number of clusters. This allowed Debian to boot, but 
> Windows would hang. I had to remap the drives in lilo.conf to get Windows 
> to boot properly.

You can alternatively provide the drive geometry settings explicitly in
a lilo.conf "append=" directive.

...while, of course, also sacrificing a chicken to the insane gods of
ATA.