How old is the computer? Can you do a flash of the BIOS? You are suggesting, that one can lie to the CMOS, boot the system on a small portion of the drive, and then Linux will be able to access the entire drive, despite the BIOS? Interesting, I didn't think that worked. Luke On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Gregory Nowak wrote: > Hello all. > > Well, a friend of mine gave me an 8 gb drive to replace the one that > failed recently in my old k5 AMD machine. In case those of you who are > reading this are wondering, yes, I still plan to write the howto on > how to convert zipslack to boot over nfs. It's just that I haven't had > time for more then going to classes, doing homework, eating, and > sleeping for the last few weeks (no, I'm not exaggerating either). > > Anyway, I put the drive in. When I start the box, it goes through the > floppy seek, and I can here it accessing the drive. After that, it > just sits there. Back when the 1.2G drive was in there, it went > through the floppy seek, I heard it access the hd, it then gave me the good old "ok" single beep, and > started looking for something from which to load the OS. > > Right now, (or at least the last time I had a sightling to look at the > screen), the drive parameters were set to auto detect in CMOS. What > I'm guessing happens now, is that the BIOS sees the new drive, sees > that it is way bigger then 2.1G (which I think is the highest this > bios can handle), and gets confused. So what I'm > guessing I need to do when I have a sighted person here to read the > screen to me, is to go into CMOS, and fool the system into thinking I > have a smaller drive. > > I think I need a cylinder value of 1023, but am not sure what good > numbers would be for heads/track, and sectors, (as well as any other > geometry values I forgot to mention). If someone could either > please provide good figures, or tell me how to figure it out, I would > appreciate it. In case it matters, I plan to have a 10 Mb boot > partition. > > Thanks. > > Greg > > > -- In memory of The Man In Black. His music will live forever!
