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Re: Lilo Q



"Alice M. Pinard" wrote:
 
> I don't see how I could do that.... the whole reason I have the hard drive
> on the Promise ultra is that it's a 60g hd and reportedly with even the
> most up to date bios available for my mb it will only see 32g
> 
> wouldn't putting a hd that it can't see all of be a problem? I'd be afraid
> that it could get corrupted if I tried to boot on it under those
> conditions

Was the motherboard purchased/made after June 1999?  This seems to be
the cutoff date for the 32GB problem with Award BIOSes.  The 32GB
problem is caused by the BIOS being unable to cope with more than 65535
cylinders, which is kind of irrelevant because for all HD's greater than
8GB, LBA is used.  The drive geometry thing (cylinders/heads/sectors)
has been a total kludge for many many years, and these days it really
doesn't matter anymore, that is the whole point of LBA.  Even if the
BIOS doesn't see the full capacity, if LBA is being used (which should
most certainly be the case) it won't matter as long as the /boot
partition is in the "BIOS visible" part of the disk.  So, as long as the
board is not totally ancient and supports LBA, I'd say it should work. 
Might want to doublecheck the lilo docs on this.

There is a great page at <http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/bios/size.htm>
that lists all these "limitations" and the reason for each.  

> btw, if it helps any, in the process of all this I've discovered that my
> motherboard is an asus tpx4 and my bios is a 109l (I can't decide if the
> 'award modular bios v4.51g' is a red herring or somehow relevant... but
> the 109l shows up where the asus site says to look for the bios version)

The way it works is that Award supplies a sort of generic BIOS framework
to the motherboard manufacturers, who customize it to their specifics. 
So "Award Modular Bios v4.51g" really doesn't mean anything, I would
guess that the vast majority of motherboards with an Award BIOS say the
same thing.  So 109l is the version number that matters, and you should
definitely flash it to the current version, if you haven't already.


> I did go to the asus ng to see if they had any ideas on whether the tpx4
> is even capable of booting from an offboard controller but those who

Is there an option called "Boot other device"?  It's usually listed near
the options for "boot order", "floppy seek", "swap floppy drive", etc. 
Try enabling that.

If all else fails, you can always put lilo on a floppy.

Brian


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