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On Wednesday 20 August 2008 23:06, jon.davey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > 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. I remember being ecstatic to discover linux could use partitions that were larger than the bios limit. http://www.acronis.com/resource/tips-tricks/2004/linux-partition.html and http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html#toc3 give some clues Tom te tom te tom -- 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