[Gllug] Booting older x86 boards from a large ide disc

[Ian Norton]

On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 13:15, Chris Bell wrote:
> Hello,
>    I have often heard that it is possible to boot an older computer from a
> disc that is larger than the BIOS understands, simply by ensuring that the
> bootable partition is completely within the area addressable by the BIOS.
>    Unfortunately my experience has always been that the BIOS hangs during
> the initial start if the primary master disc is oversize, so the only
> successful method is to boot from a smaller disc and tell the BIOS that
> there is no large disc present. If I set the BIOS to "auto" for CDROM drives
> and "none" where hard discs are present then both Knoppix and the Debian
> installer CD's will boot, find, and access the discs, but without the CD the
> BIOS does not look for the discs, and is unable to boot.
>    Some discs have a jumper to limit access, but that would not seem to be
> what I wish to do, even the Debian installer does not find the whole disc.
> Have I missed something? Should I look for a replacement BIOS (if
> available) or is the Open BIOS feasible?

Hi Chris,

in the past all i have needed to do for this is to set the disk geometry
manually in the bios, pretty much anything will do, then you should be
easily able to access the mbr and boot from it, after booting both linux
and nt throw out the bios disk geometry and use thier own ones.

set it to an LBA mode disk of about 400mb, then put the disk in and
viola,

Ian
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug