On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, Felix Miata wrote:
"Any modern Linux will see 850MB, 15GB, & 80GB drives as long as the
cabling and jumpers are correct."
Later, Rob Blomquist wrote:
"The 850 is the bootable disk containing the OS, the other 2 drives are
mounted
to that disk, so the 80 Gb would not have to be booted."
After which, alan wrote:
"But it may not be able to boot it if it is the drive with /boot on it
and
/boot is past where the motherboard can see."
Apparently alan missed the begining of the thread, where in response to
Rob Blomquist's original question:
Felix Miata wrote:
"All that BIOS translation gibberish is irrelevant if you DO NOT need to
boot from the device. If this is the case, simply set the BIOS to NONE
for the device. Then Linux will pick it up correctly, unassisted by any
deficiencies that may be present in the BIOS."
Now what all the above means is the demarcation line beyond which
booting is not possible is irrelevant to any drive set to NONE in the
BIOS. The OP is booting from an 850MB drive, not the drives the BIOS
doesn't understand. Since the boot loader IS where the BIOS can find it
(the box is running RH 7.1, though it doesn't see the whole 80GB), the
BIOS does initiate startup from the visible /boot (on the 850MB), after
which Linux takes over (any demarcation line is irrelevant).
> I solved the problem by buying a Promise IDE-133 controller. It has its
> own bios for the drives. A good way to bypass flaky ide controllers.
Can be if you have an available PCI slot, which is often not the case
with old motherboards. The FIC 503+ the original poster is using has
only 3 PCI slots to start with.
> They are about $50 or so from Office Despot. They are near the hard
> drive. I seem to remember them in a Western Digital box.
Considerably less elsewhere for a generic.
--
"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom...."
Proverbs 9:10 NIV
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409
Felix Miata *** http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/partitioningindex.html
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