Large HD, old BIOS

[Dan Jenkins]

Cole Tuininga wrote:

>  I recently purchased a brand new 200G (just ATA 100) drive to use for
>  a file server at home. I bought a motherboard, cpu and memory off a
>  friend (P3 based). When I got the system put together, the BIOS
>  (which I did flash to the latest version) only seems to recognize it
>  as a 8.5 GB drive. However, even though the BIOS only sees it as
>  such, several of the distributions I've tried see that it is indeed a
>  200GB drive. Despite this however, I can't seem to get the boot
>  loader to cooperate.
>
>  Am I fighting a loosing battle trying to use this motherboard? Is it
>  possible for a distro to handle the drive even though the BIOS
>  doesn't? Thanks in advance for helping out a hardware ignorant linux
>  user. 8)

The distro is reading the drive specs directly from the drive. It 
doesn't need the BIOS.
The BIOS can't interpret the drive size properly. Since you have the 
newest BIOS,
there's not much you can do about the BIOS. However, the boot loader may 
be able
to work around the problem. Which boot loader are you using: LILO, GRUB, 
other?
Sometimes you can pass the drive parameters to the boot loader and get 
it to boot that
way. How is it failing?
-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-624-7272
*** Technical Support for over a Quarter Century