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Re: [LUG] my Tyan MB

 

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


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