re: bootable cylinder limit? All manner of things seem to have broken when I went from a 500 gig drive to 1 TB, or maybe it's because I added Linux. For years I've been using the method that used to be in the OpenBSD FAQ of using dd to write out the first sector of the partition you want to boot to a file, copying that into the Windows partition, then setting it up in Windows boot.ini. It worked this time for a week or so, and only Linux broke, OpenBSD and Windows still work.
I used lilo because it was willing to install into the Linux partition, not the MBR. That might be possible with grub, I'm now reading http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html. Seems like I might need to chain load grub from the Windows bootloader. I wanted each OS self-contained so as a last resort if I flagged that partition bootable the OS installed there would boot, or I could link a copied bootsector from boot.ini. I've used lilo (and loadlin) before, not grub. Grub seemingly won't boot Windows, it has to be the other way around. I did get lilo up by putting the Debian install CD back in and it seems limited to LBA32, not LBA48 as dmesg shows my drive using. Yes, the problem with LBA, not CHS, is that you need really big (unsigned) integers. I hate it when you want to return to a simpler way of life and find it doesn't work anymore. I have a bootable floppy image from Windows 95 so I just tried to set that up as the bootable part of a CD (worked before) so I could run Norton Utilities to look at the MBR. Comes up not finding command.com. Same thing happens with a Dell Diagnostics CD I made in 2008. All this fancy crap... -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
