[linux-help] Re: Hard Drive Upgrade

[Jonathan Hall <jonhall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The 8.4gb limit, AFAIK, is just another BIOS issue (same as the 540mb
limit).  I, at least, have not run into a situation where I couldn't use a >
8.4gb drive with Linux, even when the BIOS didn't recognize it.  But then...
I haven't used just a whole lot of > 8.4gb drives, either... so my
experience on the matter should not be taken as authoritative.

-- Jonathan


On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 03:56:27PM -0500, Steven Saner wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 03:53:31PM -0500, Dale W Hodge wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: linux-help-bounce@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:linux-help-bounce@xxxxxxxxx]On
> > > Behalf Of Steven Saner
> > >
> > > Actually, Linux doesn't care about that limitation because it handles
> > > disk I/O, rather than the BIOS. The only thing you need to do is make
> > > sure that the boot partition is in the first 540MB of the hard drive
> > > so it will boot (which requires the BIOS). Once booted, there should
> > > be no problem (or so that has been my experience with at least a 1.2GB
> > > drive).
> > >
> > On one of my Linux boxes I have a 40G drive that the bios doesn't even see. 
> > Once
> > Linux boots off the smaller drive it recognizes the that the larger drive is
> > installed and works perfectly. Some large drives can work as boot drives 
> > even if
> > the bios doesn't recognize it, but others don't.  Your best bet is to read 
> > the
> > large disc howto at 
> > http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO
> > 
> > --dwh
> > 
> > ---
> > Dale W Hodge - dwh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Secretary & Website Maintainer - info@xxxxxxxxx
> > Air Capital Linux User's Group  (ACLUG)
> 
> 
> 
> Don't you also run into an issue sometimes where older IDE controllers
> can't deal with drives over a certain size, in which case you can't
> use anything bigger than that? Seems to me I remember an 8-9 GB limit
> for some controllers.
> 
> Steve
> 
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