Large HD, old BIOS

[Tilly, Lawrence]

Do you have a small, otherwise unused HD you could install just as your
boot device?  If not, I'm sure someone around here has an old 850MB or
such sitting in their surplus.  Put your boot stuff on that and then let
the distro of choice recognize the big drive for fileserving.
Alternatively, you could get a cheap CDROM and setup a boot-from-CD
config.  Just a couple suggestions to keep the board, etc you are trying
to use.

-Lawrence

-----Original Message-----
From: gnhlug-discuss-admin at mail.gnhlug.org
[mailto:gnhlug-discuss-admin at mail.gnhlug.org] On Behalf Of Cole Tuininga
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 9:08 AM
To: GNHLUG List
Subject: Re: Large HD, old BIOS


On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 22:37, Dan Jenkins wrote:
> 
> 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?

I've tried both.  I've attempted to install Debian woody (using the bf24
install set, but doesn't actually see the entire drive) and Mandrake
10.0 community edition, both of which seem to want to use lilo.

I've tried using a little known distro called Arch Linux
(http://www.archlinux.org), RH 9, and Fedora Core 2 - all of which seem
to want to use GRUB.

Figuring that I needed the boot loader (and probably kernel) in a lower
region of the hard drive, I made sure to create a /boot partition at the
beginning.  Didn't seem to help....

> Sometimes you can pass the drive parameters to the boot loader and get
> it to boot that
> way. How is it failing?

With lilo, it seems to just hang.  I get LI .... and then nothing.  The
system is hung.

With grub, I get various and sundry errors.  It claims to "be loading"
and then it'll give me a (inconsistent) numeric error code.

-- 
A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like
a dog without bricks tied to its head.

Cole Tuininga
Lead Developer
Code Energy, Inc
colet at code-energy.com
PGP Key ID: 0x43E5755D


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