Hi Fred.
> One of my old 486 has a Bios not made for disks larger than
> 540mb but it can still recognize and ident a 1gb disk and load
> its parms into the bios setup table. But when I load/run Linux
> with the 1gb disk , it slows down enormously and so becomes
> useless. Detailed reason why unclear to me. I thought Linux was
> BIOS independent more or less! I am sure there are workarounds
> to that problem, like ezdisk etc.
I have several old 386's and 486's with this problem, and all run
Linux straight off the hard drive without problems. Here's the
procedure I used:
1. Use MSDOS 5.00 or later to write a valid MBR record to the hard
drive by running FDISK /MBR from a floppy. The procedure below
doesn't work if this isn't done.
2. When installing Linux, create a "Linux native" partition in the
/dev/hda1 slot which starts at the beginning of the disk and
is sized somewhere between 6 and 16 Megs, whatever fits. Select
this for mounting as /boot in the install procedure, and mark
it as the active partition.
The rest of the disk can be partitioned how you wish, but no
other /dev/hda* partition may be marked active.
3. Install LILO in /dev/hda1 (boot sctor of the active partition)
and NOT in /dev/hda (master boot record).
I've seen various other schemes that allow LILO to be installed in
/dev/hda but, unlike the above, none of them work reliably.
Best wishes from Riley.
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
| development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
| in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* ftp://ftp.MemAlpha.cx/pub/rhw/Linux
* http://www.MemAlpha.cx/kernel.versions.html
