GRUB Error 18 - all of a sudden?!

[adamscybot]

Well. I've been running fedora core 4 alongside windows xp home edition on a grub 1.5 setup for a few months now without any difficulties. Linux is installed on its own partition which is quite small size (i cant remember exactly, I think its 40GB, above 8GB anyway - read on to why I mentioned 8GB) and windows takes up the rest of that drive and another drive too.

So today, an hour or so ago, I was happily playing counter strike source on windows xp. Then, all of a sudden (it wasnt like it was stressful for the pc, I was only browsing servers) the computer completely crashed. The only option was to hard reboot. It then got to:

GRUB Loading stage1.5.


GRUB loading, please wait
Error 18

The computer then just stopped there and never boot. After restarting 3 times, I realised the error was definetly an error.

So here I am on my laptop. I googled error 18 and found that it is something to do with the bios not supporting large drives (8gb +). But as far as I know, it does, and its been working fine for months anyway. I havent touched the bios at all or upgraded it or anything. The problem is very random. I can no longer boot to anything (except for the bios).

Due to the nature of how it crashed before the problem, I fear a duff hard drive may be the problem.

Can someone tell me what to do/where to go from here. Im completely stuck.

Thanks,
Adam

[havenoclu]

If you suspect the hard drive went bad, I would grab the diagnostic tool from the manufacturer and run a short diag...and then an extended one if the short passes. IE: If you have a maxtor hard drive...goto maxtors website and look for the diagnostic tool (or you could get the ultimate boot cd which has almost all of them www.ultimatebootcd.com). If it fails, you can try and salvage your data somehow (external enclosure to your laptop, hooking the drive as a slave to an operational machine, booting a live cd/rescue cd, etc...), and then low-level format/re-install the drive to see if that fixes it.. If the drive passes the diags, you could try and fix grub, run fsck, etc.. (info's all over the net on repairing grub).

[Jongi]

The harddrive diagnostics the best option.

What you could also do is insert the install disc, and type linux rescue at the prompt. If your FC install is intact it should pick it up. If that's the case you could try a reinstall of GRUB.