Re: Trouble booting from a large USB hard drive

[Isaac Dupree <ml@isaac.cedarswampstudios.org>]

Daniel Richard G. wrote:
> What all but confirmed it for me was an ingenious solution I saw posted 
> somewhere: an out-of-order partition table. Put the Linux partitions first on 

I accidentally have an out-of-order partition table and I was surprised 
that such a thing is possible (vs. that everything gets automatically 
numbered in order).  Nevertheless, it is a useful feature, though not 
obvious how to control with 'gparted' and the like.  "extended 
partitions" probably add a bit of complication too.

> With all that said, I don't consider this to be a bug in GRUB, and this is not 
> meant to be taken as a bug report. (I presume grub-pc can't work around such 
> limitations in the BIOS, because there isn't enough room in the MBR to stuff 
> in a disk-reading library that makes BIOS disk calls unnecessary.) Rather, I 
> think it is a corner case of which users should be aware---and perhaps GRUB 
> and/or the Ubuntu installer could do a better job of warning the user

if grub-install, which doesn't have code space limitations, could 
possibly check for it, it would be a great help.  But is it possible for 
  a running system to check the BIOS like that? (or possible for grub to 
check somehow on a non-running system in a safe testing sort of manner?)