Comment 49 for bug 403408

@claudeheintz: my emachine (gateway) laptop also has a size limit (learned this the hard way with winxp) but there is an easier solution which doesnt have to waste any harddisk space. ALWAYS make your first partition a boot partition. Make 1gb partition to host all the linux kernels. And you could put ur system partition beyond the 137gb and your linux will always boot. So you could have /boot(grub) /winxp /linux. As long as winxp is in the 137gb limit all your systems would always boot. You still get the error message (as you should) but you will boot fine. See once the linux kernel is loaded it knows how to handle the bios 28bit limitation. It uses its internal drivers instead of going trough the bios. Unfortunately, sometimes, winxp moves it boot files beyond the 137gb limit so you might get unbootable winxp if your winxp partition extends beyond the 128GiB. Using a /boot partition you dont have to have unusable space on your disk, you would be able to utilize the whole disk as it was meant to be.