[INSTALL] Re: Does Linux use BIOS parameters for disk?
On Thu, 7 Aug 1997, Chris Brown wrote:
> I have several old 386 machines around that would be nice for
> different tasks. These machines have older BIOSs in them that
> can't deal with larger IDE drives. My experience with DOS is that
> you need to fdisk and format the drive on a machine that properly
> supports the particular disk but once that is done DOS is happy to
> ignore the BIOS. Is this the case with Linux? Is it necessary to
> pass the disk parameters to the kernel at boot time?
Older BIOS usually means: no LBA translation, so the BIOS and any program
that uses only BIOS calls cannot access the part of the disk that is
beyond 540 MB.
The linux kernel does not use the BIOS, so it is perfectly happy with the
large disk.
But, the kernel has to be loaded at some time on bootup. Because lilo uses
BIOS calls for this, the kernel image (/vmlinuz) must be below the 540 MB
limit or lilo cannot boot it.
This does not apply if your you can use LBA mode on the disk (improbable
with old 386 hardware).
Joost
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