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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. -- 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