Alrighty! I poked high and low and found some really interesting things about hard drive limitations, BIOS, etc. Finally, I decided to risk the 15% restocking fee and installed the HD. And Debian is installing great so far, and `cfdisk` recognizes all 120GB! Here's information for the archive:
I found a really good information on hard drive size limitations on this webpage: http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/bioslim.htm To summarize, there are several limitations to recognizing the hard drive size. The limits are at 504MB, 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB sizes (and maybe 32GB?) The limitations come from the BIOS and the OS. But since Linux doesn't have OS problems, that's not a problem. And the BIOS is no problem since Linux ignores the BIOS once it loads itself. The only problem is with Linux loading -- sometimes BIOS won't recognize the hard drive to a point where it won't even load Linux. That's the only issue as I understand it. But (I'm guessing) you should be able to overcome that problem with a floppy or another HD that *is* recognized by BIOS. My Maxtor hard drive came with a CD with such software, and I was gonna give it a shot, but it wasn't necessary after all. My computer recognized the hard drive as a 8GB hard drive in LBA mode, and booted the MBR just fine (I later found out.) My BIOS, by the way, is Award 4.51pg with PnP extensions, and does know LBA hard drive sizing. But I did have one problem with my computer, which was that the BIOS doesn't support CDROM booting, which I need to install Debian install CD. A little browsing found a nice little program called a "smart boot manager" that does just that and then some: http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ So my installation continues, apparently without problems! -Mark -- Mark K. Kim http://www.cbreak.org/ PGP key available upon request. _______________________________________________ vox-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
