[sclug] [OT] Linux support for large HDD

[Alex Butcher]

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Ian Park wrote:

> Please forgive a "wet behind the ears" question...
>
> I'm planning to use an oldish (ca 1998) motherboard (300 MHz Pentium II, 
> 512MB RAM) as the basis of a fileserver for my home network, using a 6.3GB 
> hard drive as the primary master for the OS and a 160GB hard drive as the 
> primary slave for the file store. I'm pretty sure that the BIOS on the 
> motherboard won't support 48-bit LBA, so the *BIOS* won't be able to see the 
> full capacity of the 160GB hard drive (hence the 6.3GB drive for the OS...); 
> however what I've been able to glean from Googling gives me hope that once 
> I've got Linux booted up from the 6.3GB drive the BIOS is irrelevant, and the 
> Linux kernel drivers will look after the big hard drive.
>
> Can anyone tell me whether or not I'm being hopelessley optimistic, please?

My understanding is that the three components you need for a 48-bit LBA
device to be supported are:

a) the BIOS, if you're intending to boot from files over the 137GB limit
b) the OS
c) the ATA controller.

You may or may not run into problems on c). Give it a whirl, and let us
know! :-)

> TIAFYH
>
> Ian

HTH,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>