On Mon Jun 26 2000 at 15:11, "David Knaack" wrote:
> Greetings,
g'day mate...
> I have an old P166 that I'd like to install a new 8.5GB IDE drive in,
> however, the BIOS will not handle drives over 8GB. I would like to use the
> drive to store user files, I don't need to boot off of it.
Linux doesn't care, this is a bios limitation and there are all
sorts of ways to cope with it. There exists a Large-IDE HOWTO
(called something like that) that should be useful for you. Linux
will happily boot from it if the kernel image (usually in /boot)
lives in a sector on the hard drive within the first 1024 cylinders.
> I had attempted to make the drive the only drive in the system, but was
> unable to get RH6.2 to install on it, so I used a 1Gb drive instead. Now
> I'm cramped for space. I'm hoping I can just add this big drive to the
> existing system.
Move some/most of your file system onto that second drive, then
mount those partitions. Easy, problem solved.
> Can linux handle this large drive on the old system without having to buy a
> new BIOS?
You should be able to kludge things to get them to work. Linux only
relies on the BIOS for access to the kernel image (and initrd etc),
after that it shouldn't matter.
Unless you have a really old and very broken BIOS, then you have no
choice but to upgrade it.
Good luck, you might very well need it :)
Cheers
Tony
