Re: Using disks > 8GB
> Quoting Lance Heller (mephisto@pulse.com):
> > 2. The problem system is an old pentium running Award bios 4.5.
> > Attempts to boot an installed system from HD with Lilo have failed,
> > boot floppies however succeed. Boots fail shortly after finding,
> > and correctly reporting, the system disks, with a kernel panic as it
> > attempts to seek beyond the end of media. I'm attempting to
> > boot with a minimal system from the first disk partition, starting
> > at cylinder 0, and believe I'm below the 1024 cylinder limit.
> >
> > Maxtor provides EZ-BIOS with their disk as a work around for systems
> > having an older bios. Linux does not appear to use this feature.
> > E.g., after loading EZ-BIOS and completing the install, attempts to
> > boot the system using the boot floppy made during the install will
> > only succeed if EZ-BIOS is not loaded. If EZ-BIOS is loaded and a
> > rescue floppy booted it is possible to mount the filesystems but
> > attempts to read or write the files fail. The same process succeeds
> > if EZ-BIOS is not loaded.
Adam Rice wrote:
> Odd. You could try using loadlin if you have DOS on the computer.
There might be something hardware related. There are real problems on
older Macintosh computers, for example, with booting from volumes that
have more than 2G (2**31) or more than 4G (2**32) bytes. Seems to have
something to do with signed 32 bit words and unsigned 32 bit words
respectively.
These disks work fine once the system is rebooted, it's just that the
ROM boot code cannot be patched (because the system isn't there yet).
The fix in the Macintosh world is to format them with multiple
partitions. For example, my new 4.3G hard disk won't boot my 6100
(though it will work just fine after boot) unless I partition it
as a 3.9G (just under 4G) and a runt 400M partition. I will finally
make it into three 1.4 partitions for use, because it is handy to have
more than one bootable system and select between them depending on
the designated boot volume. You might see if partitioning the big
disk, then making the other one /usr or /home or something helps...
--
Charles B. (Ben) Cranston
mailto:zben@ni.umd.edu
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~zben
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