Re: [tlug] Large Disk on Old Hardware.

["Lyle H Saxon" <llletters@example.com>]

On 10/1/06, Greg Thomson <gregt@example.com> wrote:
> I'd like to install an 80GB hard drive in an old (soon to be ex) Win98
> system and am in need of some help.
>
> As I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that old BIOSes
> don't recognize the full capacity of large hard disks. The limit depends
> on the generation of the BIOS, but provided /boot is located within the
> portion of the disk recognized by the BIOS the kernel can boot. The
> bootloader can pass the true geometry of the disk to the kernel. The
> kernel can then access all of the disk. Is that right?

Whatever can and cannot be done to get around a BIOS that doesn't
recognize a large drive is one issue, but with a few old Dells that
I've set up, it was quite simple to get a BIOS update from Dell's site
and then the BIOS worked fine for the 120GB drives I put in in place
of the 6GB drives the computers came with - for whatever OS.

Lyle