I'm looking to upgrade a 17GB H/D in an old HP Brio BA (~400Mhz Celeron) to a 250GB one. I am warned that there are BIOS limitations which prevent me directly accessing more than 66GB - which sounds like a problem - but that I can circumvent this using drive-overlay software (under windows.) [The BIOS is Phoenix 4.0 Release 6.]
I'm not getting anywhere looking for BIOS updates - can anyone tell me if this BIOS limitation will be an issue for Gentoo? Is there some kernel configuration which would achieve the same goal as using the "drive overlay software"?
IIRC, so long as the BIOS can see the whole of the boot partition (i.e. whatever /boot is on), then it'll be fine. The kernel will normally perform it's own probe and lookup on the hard-drive during booting and then work from there. So long as the kernel can support large hard drives, it shouldn't be a problem.
I've had an 80Gb hard drive on both a P233MMX (old dell model) and currently on my Compaq SSF server (a PII-450).
The trick is to just have small partition for hda1 for the boot partition, then run wild! :) The kernel will do the rest! :D
-- Jonathan Wright <mail at djnauk dot co dot uk> Life has no meaning unless we can enjoy what we've been given -- Running on Gentoo Linux (2.6.10-gentoo-r7-djnauk-b03 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2100+ GNU/Linux) -- [email protected] mailing list
