It's been a while since I've dealt with these, so memory is a bit rusty.
You may want to follow up with a Wikipedia or general web search, for
more detailed data. I tried 'BIOS disk size limit', and one of the
sites (http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/bios.html) provided this bit:
Limit Capacity Comment
up to
1 504MB BIOS dated prior to July 1994
2 2.0GB DOS file system partition limit - BIOS dated after
July 1994
3 4.2GB CMOS extended CHS addressing limit (not widely
experienced)
4 8.4GB BIOS INT 13H 24-bit addressing limit - OBL limit
5 32.0GB BIOS limit
There is more explanation for each 'Limit' on the web page, plus links
to other sites with more info.
Bottom line is that the size of an int, the number of bits allocated to
heads, cylinders and sectors, and other technical details, limit the
maximum size of a disk that the BIOS can access. Grub uses the BIOS, as
I understand it, so it has the same limits. Remember that the BIOS has
to fit in a limited ROM chip space, so you can't give it too much
addressing/storage space without impacting other functionality.
So, yes, your 80 GB disk is 'large' and you will need to be careful with
the size and placement of your /boot and/or / partitions. Note that
what you will want, for partitioning, must look something like this:
| small /boot | / (ext3) install | XFS install | ...
The /boot and / partitions must be within the limits imposed by your
system's BIOS. The XFS partition can be anywhere, since it is accessed
by the linux kernel, which does not have these limitations.
Bob
David R. Litwin wrote:
On 13/06/06, *Bob McGowan* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
*Important note*: grub "suffers" the same limits as the BIOS does. So
if your disk is large, you will need to create your boot partition *and*
the Linux root partition near the beginning of the disk.
I thank you kindly for both posts. They have been most informative. My
question is regarding the first post (see above for context of
question). My HD is 80GB. I assume this is large and therefore I must
have the new intallation of XFS with seperate /boot at the begining of
the drive. Why is this? What is the limitation GRUB and the BIOS suffer
from?
Thanks much indeed.
--
—A watched bread-crumb never boils.
—My hover-craft is full of eels.
—[...]and that's the he and the she of it.
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