Been there, done that. You have to tell Linux pretty early about the over 8Gb drives. I was installing Debian 2.0 (hamm) to an 11Gb disk. You know on the install disk boot, where it stops to ask about extra parameters that you normally don't need? Well, you need one, roughly of this form:
hda=23059,16,63 (That's the numbers from mine. Generically, it's hdx=cyls,heads,sectors). Doing this, cfdisk was happy. In order to access this disk during normal operations, this is what is in my /etc/lilo.conf... [...other stuff...] image=/vmlinuz label=Linux read-only append="hda=23059,16,63" There may be other ways around this particular nastiness, but this way worked for me. Jim Russell Crypto Engineer LockStar, Inc.