On 2010-12-18 20:22, Allen wrote:
On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 08:45 -0500, Chris Knadle wrote:
Some older Pentium III hardware had limits to using 160 GB hard disks for
booting because of the BIOS. And before that, back in the Pentium II days
there were limits of about 40 GB for the boot disk because of the BIOS.
Once either of these are /booted/ into /Linux/ which doesn't use the BIOS,
then the /other/ disks can be bigger.
So be careful... the 320 GB disk *might* work or might not; the T23 might
be old enough that it really has a 160 GB limit due to the BIOS.
If you do find that it has that limit, I suppose you could boot it from CD
or USB to get around that, but ... that would kinda suck to have to do.
-- Chris
I have some experience with this since my two desktop PCs are year 2000
PIII's (with PATA HDDs).
The specific BIOS issue is 48-bit LBA support. The limitation applies to
the boot sector, which must reside within the limit. Other than that, I
believe a larger HDD is OK.
That doesn't sound right. The specific problem I've seen is that the
hard disk isn't seen *at all* by the BIOS if it's too large. Being an
LBA problem could be, but the limit being on where the boot sector
doesn't, because IIRC when I ran into this even having a /boot partition
early on the disk still didn't allow the disk to show up in the BIOS,
thus it couldn't be booted.
With any luck the specs for the T23 are available to find out
specifically what the hard disk size limit is for it.
In my files, I have dates as to when BIOSes began shipping with 48-bit
LBA support. IIRC, it is around 2002.
I had a T20 in January 2001, and the T23 wasn't far behind.
If you had space in the T23 for a second HDD, you could boot from a
small HDD. The second HDD would not have size limits.
That would definitely work, as I've done that with desktop hardware.
--
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Jan 5 - Building a Community Site with Drupal
Feb 2 - Zimbra
Mar 2 - MHVLUG 8th Anniversary - Show and Tell
