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Re: [LUG] my Tyan MB

 

Rob Beard writes: 

> 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 
> 
> -- 
....I'm not sure how old the board is but it came with it's origional 
processors which are P3's. I have a 20G HDD that boots and a 40G one that 
doesn't.....hmmm the drive that boots has got Windows 98 installed on it. 
Does this imply anything do you think?
Jon Davey. 



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