[H-GEN] Accessing large disks using an old BIOS

Michael Anthon michael at anthon.net
Sat May 5 19:26:20 EDT 2001


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Greetings,
I have a sitution where I wish to put a 2G drive into and old 486DX100
box and I'm coming a little unstuck.  The BIOS is (obviously) fairly old
and I don't seem to be able to configure it to work with the drive.  I
can actually set the correct parameters into the BIOS, but it hangs
during the POST if I do that.

I have tried the kernel option "hdb=4082/16/64", but then when the
kernel attempts to access it I get a lot of "lost interrupt" errors and
it never gets past the bit where it tries to read the partition table.

As I type this, it sounds to me like a hardware issue, however this
drive was working about 5 minutes before I put it into this machine so I
know the drive is OK, though that does not rule out cable problems and I
think I might try using another cable or maybe even putting this drive
onto the secondary IDE

Can anybody suggest anything else I might try?

Cheers
Michael

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