[Nottingham] BIG disk bootup fun

[Roger Light]

> As a nlug_party 'exercise', I put a very big new disk into a very old 
> machine... (Story follows (:-))
> 
> To get the 250GByte drive in the old machine here to boot was 
> 'interesting'. Mandrake 10.1 installed fine, and then failed on the 
> reboot into the newly installed system. The BIOS doesn't find the drive, 
> not even the first 8GB.

The Gentoo handbook (about half way down this page http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=7 ) says:

If your BIOS can't handle large harddrives and you jumpered the harddrive to report a limited size you have to enable the following option to gain access to your whole harddrive:

Code Listing 9: Selecting autogeometry resizing support

(2.4.x kernel only)
ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support --->
  IDE, ATA and ATAPI Block devices --->
    <*>   Include IDE/ATA-2 DISK support
    [ ]     Use multi-mode by default
    [*]     Auto-Geometry Resizing support


This is for 2.4.x only (does that mean it is available for 2.6 automatically?) and sounds interesting. Does your drive have a jumper you can set to limit the size? Seems like it is worth a try.

Cheers,

Roger


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