On Sat, 2003-03-22 at 12:30, Wesley Parish wrote: > I am attempting to revive an old 1994-era PC for use with an semi-official > selinux distro based on RedHat 7.x. > > The BIOS won't recognize the (second-hand) 10 GB drive I'm hoping is still > usable, for obvious reasons. Does anyone know how to "deceive" the BIOS so > it reads the hard drive?
yep - piece of cake. In the BIOS, do an auto-detect if its there. Most likely the drive will be seen as 514 Mb with 16 heads 63 cyl/track and 1023 cylinders. When you boot your linux floppy (?) watch dmesg, it will probably tell you something like: hda: ST340016A, ATA DISK drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 hda: 78165360 sectors (40021 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=4865/255/63, UDMA Partition check: /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0: p1 p2 p4 < p5 > Thats a 40 Gb drive. If you see the correct details for your 10 Gb drive then your linux install will see the full drive. When partitioning before installing linux you need to make a partiton at the front of the drive, and it should be a primary partition. It needs to be about 10 Mb, but anything from 2 Mb to 50 Mb is fine. Then make a root partition, then a swap partition, then whatever other partitions you want. Here's the drive partitioning scheme on an old P150 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/ida/c0d0p2 204M 90M 104M 46% / /dev/ida/c0d0p1 12M 1.5M 9.5M 14% /boot /dev/ida/c0d0p5 961M 523M 389M 57% /usr /dev/hdc1 7122M 6241M 611M 89% /rlay The reason for all this and why it works is that the machine runs lilo, which is capable of telling the bios to start reading and booting at off-set 0xXXXXX, where the kernel starts on disk. Since the kernel is completely within the front 500 Mb, the bios is quite happy to read it, run it, and hand control over to the kernel. >From then on the kernel is quite happy to do the rest of the work. Back in the old days, we had to do this all the time. It was an uber-cool board that didn't need this. The age of your distro won't really have any effect on how you deal with the old hardware. > Or alternatively, does anyone know about suitable recent-era BIOSes and how to > replace them? Not really feasable afaik. There was talk about a linux-based bios chip, that reduces POST tests and replaces the bios setup prog, but I dunno what state its in. Ask Mister Google.
