What you want to do should be quite possible. Back when I switched from
Slackware to RedHat 5.0 (long time ago especially seeing that I have
been using Mandrake exclusively for a year and a half now) I also got my
hands on a 850 MB drive in stuck it in a (now long gone) 486 that had
the same problem. I was able, using Linux's fdisk, to use the first
half of the drive for Windows 95 and the second half for Linux. This is
when I began to really like Linux especially seeing that Windows was
bent on thinking that the drive was only 504 megs.
What I did way back when to get things to work was to go into Linux's
fdisk like mentioned before, hit x for
extra functionality, then hit c for change number of cylinders. Of
course I had to look at the hard drive and write down the exact number
of cylinders. The main problem that you may find with this is that
Mandrake gives you a graphical partition utility and I never really
probed around to see if there is a way inside of their utility do screw
around with the number of cylinders or if it is even necessary.
Here are some extra things to consider when looking into this problem.
One is that the Linux kernel once it is loaded into memory it takes
direct control over the hardware and bypasses such things as the BIOS
(in modern PC's the BIOS pretty lame anyway), but the boot loader still
needs the BIOS in order to load the kernel in the first place. To be
friendly with DOS and to be as consistent as possible with what the boot
loader sees (if I got the story straight) the Linux kernel has a
tendency to pay attention to what is in the BIOS unless there is nothing
in the BIOS. One amusing thing that I have done to get Linux to not get
screwed up by BIOS settings on one system that I added a bigger hard
drive to (45 GB drive added to a 1 1/2 year old Ultra33 based m/b) is to
just disable the drive in the BIOS and let Linux detect the drive by
itself. Of course the drive couldn't be booted off of, but then again
in this case we where upgrading the disk capacity, so we could get away
with it. This also leads to what I mentioned above about manually
setting the number of cylinders on a drive. Once the kernel takes
charge it will pay more attention to how big the partitions are
specified and the geometry specified in the partition table than what's
in the BIOS, but if you are booting off the drive, you have to be
mindful of what the BIOS says when it comes to stuff that needs to be
loaded before the kernel takes control (specially the /boot directory).
One other thing to be mindful of is that I did have some experiences
with early Pentium m/b BIOS's that had some really ugly problems when it
came to detecting and addressing 2+ GB hard drives (or maybe some of the
boards that I messed with way back when where just fowled up). It has
been a while and I don't remember much in the way of details, but I do
vaguely remember cylinder addressing getting all fowled up and tones of
corruption and booting problems.
> I have an older Pentium 90 that will not fully see a 2.1 GB HD. I
> have formatted the HD cleanly and the BIOS will only see the first 504
> MB. I have read in the archives that it is not recommended to install
> Linux using a HD overlay. Is it possible to install 7.2 and then
> reformat the remaining portions of the HD to get the full benefit of
> the 2.1 GB? I would really appreciate any assistance. I don't want to
> give this up and I don't want to have to buy a new motherboard and
> components just to install Linux.Don
