Big (> 137GB) Drive Support

[David Mandala]

You thoughts are for the most part correct. However, it is possible for
some machine to refuse to boot on big hard drives, in that case even a
small partition will not work. 

For example when I hacked my TIVO's I put a 120G HD in my old computer
to prep it for the TIVO, the machine would not boot until I turned off
that HD in the bios completely! Since Linux does not use the PC's BIOS
for anything past the initial boot once I was in Linux all was fine,
Linux saw the HD and I was able to prep it. But I would not have been
able to ever boot from in in my PC.

The Linux BIOS project is quite nice, if you are using a mother board
that they support you can get a sub 5 second boot time into Linux vs the
up to 1 minute boot time of some PC's.

Cheers,

Davidm

On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 20:02, Darrell Shandrow wrote:
> Hi Fritz,
> 
> Drive geometry and how it relates to a system's BIOS is still something
> which I have a bit of difficulty getting my mind around.  I know that a
> motherboard with an obsolete BIOS will not work with modern very large hard
> drives, and that various limits in cylinders, heads and sectors values in
> BIOS have resulted in size limitations, such as the 8.4 GB limit.
> 
> But, I think some of this can be gotten around through the operating system.
> For example, I installed a 20 GB hard drive into a 1997 ventage system,
> performed auto-detection on the BIOS, then successfully installed RedHat
> Linux 7.2 onto that drive.  I thought I'd run into some sort of BIOS/drive
> size limit, and have to make multiple partitions, but that turned out to be
> unnecessary.  I was able to have a small boot partition at the beginning of
> the drive, followed by the large partition (somewhere around 18 or 19 GB)
> and a swap partition, with no trouble at all!  Note that this is a
> single-boot system; only Linux has been installed.  There's nothing fancy
> happening like dual-booting.
> 
> From the research I have done, here's what I think is happening.  The BIOS
> is auto-detecting the drive, and coming up with CHS for a smaller drive size
> than the 20 GB limit, even after doing some sort of LBA translation.
> Unfortunately, since I can't see the BIOS screen (that happens long before
> the OS loads, and thus no screen reader is running) I can't tell you the CHS
> figures the BIOS is generating.  The system then proceeds to boot from the
> hard disk's boot sector at the beginning of the disk.  Since that points to
> Linux, the Linux kernel loads.  The Kernel is in the boot partition, which
> is also the first partition on the drive, so this fits well within whatever
> the BIOS drive size limit would be.  At that point, the Linux kernel takes
> over disk access functions, and is smart enough to work around the size
> limitations.  Am I in the right ballpark on this?  Additional information
> would be great.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Fritz" <fkolberg@qwest.net>
> To: "PLUG-Discuss" <plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 06, 2002 10:22 AM
> Subject: Big (> 137GB) Drive Support
> 
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> >                 Does anyone know the status of the support for the new
> >                 big (greater than 137GB) IDE drives that are starting
> >                 to appear?  I would imagine there are prerequisites
> >                 such as a fairly new mobo, BIOS updates, etc.
> >
> >                 Do most of these drives (e.g. Western-Digital, Maxtor)
> >                 include a controller card in their "boxed retail"
> >                 versions (or do they rely on the mobo IDE controller)?
> >
> >                 Reply to list ... TIA.
> >
> >                 Fritz
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
David IS Mandala
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