GRUB error 28

Dragon561 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Oct 2002 Posts: 112

Whenever I go to boot Gentoo, I get an error 28, file is too big for memory. However, I got 512 ram and I also specified it using uppermem. but still no luck, any suggestions?

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

Welcome to the world of x86. you can have as much ram as you want but your bootloader wont be able to see more than a few megs of it. What you need to do is make your kernel smaller.
Whenever possible compile as modules, and you should be ok.

handsomepete · Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2003 2:52 pm Post subject:

There's also a known issue regarding nForce chipsets and the current version of grub in Portage which causes this error regardless of kernel size. If you're running an nForce board download the grub version in CVS or switch to lilo.

Dragon561 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Oct 2002 Posts: 112

Well, I narrowed my kernel down to nothing. Still, I got the error 28. I made sure it was a new bzImage i copied over to boot. Still it was too big. Any sugesstions?

jlowell · Guru Joined: 08 Jan 2003 Posts: 389

Dragon561,

Not only is the Error 28 madness an known issue with nForce chipsets as handsomepete reports, its a known issue across the board. I couldn't get Red Hat 8.0 to boot on this machine using Grub because of it and Red Hat tech support couldn't resolve the problem either. Its been reported as a bug there and, last I heard, an expected redo of Grub in the near future is supposed to deal with it. Use Lilo instead.

jlowell

Dragon561 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Oct 2002 Posts: 112

Problem solved. It turns out that I have been compiling gentoo on a athlon-mp machine for a pentium machine. For some reason GRUB wasn't detecting all my lower memory, but when i pu the hard drive back into the pentium box, it detected it and Gentoo booted just fine. I guess there is an error with gentoo optimized systems detecting everything in a athlon box. (duh) Anyway, thanks for the support.