D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] my Tyan MB

 

jon.davey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> 
> ....I think I've got it! I tried using my old HDD and it booted no problem 
> so now I'm thinking it's something to do with the size/number of cylinders 
> that my harddrives have. The new ones are too big and the old BIOS can't 
> handle them....what I reckon anyway. Any ideas what I should do about this?
> Cheers, Jon Davey.
> 

Must be an old motherboard then!

Thinking back to the olden days (mid 90's) IIRC one of the ways of 
getting around this was to have a small (around 100 or so Megabyte) 
partition at the start of the disc which was mounted as /boot.

The kernel and boot stuff such as Lilo (or Grub) would sit in here and 
the theory was the because the partition was smaller than 1024 cylinders 
the BIOS would be able to see it and boot up and then the kernel would 
take over and get around the BIOS limits.

It would have to be an oldish motherboard though to be affected by this. 
  IIRC boards from the late 90's had some limits around the 8GB mark and 
then I think it went up to 132GB on later boards.  Now though as far as 
I'm aware the BIOS on PCs can handle really large drives.

How big are these drives anyway?

Rob

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html