Re: Hard disk forces BIOS upgrade - but can I use it safely before upgrading ?
On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Paul J. Keenan wrote:
> So I've bought a new hard disk (Maxtor DiamondMax VL20 10.2Gb UDMA66),
> but have discovered that my Award BIOS will only address a maximum of
> 8.4Mb.
<snip>
> Can someone tell if it's safe to dive in right now and I can get the
> extra 1.8Gb at a later date when the new BIOS arrives without losing
> my data ?
Personally I wouldn't worry about it all, and I wouldn't bother getting a
BIOS upgrade. :) (Unless there are other compelling reasons to do so.)
The Award BIOS on my motherboard (Asus) also only saw 8.4 GB of my Maxtor
DiamondMax 17.2 GB disk. Fortunately, LILO didn't care.
I had to use "Normal" in the BIOS setup (not LBA) and then linux [c]fdisk
was able to see my whole disk (YMMV on what BIOS modes you need to
choose... fiddle with it a bit and I'm sure you'll reach a combination
that works). I made my partitions and everything has been fine. Note
however that you should make a small /boot partition, maybe about 15 MB,
to ensure that all your kernels and other files that the BIOS needs to
"see" when booting are constrained within the first 1024 cylinders of your
disk.
So make a small /boot partition and then partition the rest how you like.
My disk is only ext2, no other OS on here, but it wouldn't matter. Here's
how I partitioned it:
$ df
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda2 15885614 4272761 10785966 28% /
/dev/hda1 14607 7003 6850 51% /boot
/dev/hda3 208349 177054 20535 90%
/usr/local/squid/cache
You will want to choose a different partitioning scheme of course, just
make sure you make that small /boot partition and everything should work
fine. And of course any questions you have or snags you run into can be
posted to the list. :)
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