[Rule-list] Using large hard drives with old BIOS/hardware

[Richard Kweskin]

On Friday 27 September 2002 07:11 pm, C David Rigby wrote:

> I have succeeded in installing RedHat 7.2 in the RULE Low-Memory
> configuration via miniconda-0.7.2.  Here is what was needed:
>
> 1) hardware changes
>       The most necessary change for this old machine seems to have been
> replacing the 1046 cylinder drive with a smaller drive that did not exceed
> the old BIOS's limit of 1024 cylinders.  Previously, standard RedHat 6.2
> installation would not complete.  After the hard drive swap, it did.
> snip

Hello All

Coming from DOS, I was startled to find that windows nt4.0 managed to read 
disks larger than the bios could "see" (if the right patches were applied.) 
GNU/Linux does it out of the box. I first read this in Britiain's Linux 
Format vol 23 pg 67 where the url 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-9.html
is mentioned.
Not following the suggestions, I tried another way: using an old 586 whose 
bios is limited to 8.3GB, the hda was an old 1.2GB so it was properly 
declared in the cmos. hdc was a 30GB drive but no entry was put in the cmos 
at all. On this large drive were the 3 iso images of valhalla. Miniconda and 
slinky were able to "see" the entire hdc and install valhalla from the 
images!

Richard