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

[Michael Anthon]

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Right, fixed it 8^)

I'm not 100% certain what the actual problem was, I put the larger drive
on the secondary IDE controller and it worked (using the kernel boot
parameter hdc=4082,16,63 since the BIOS doesn't know about secondary
IDEs).  I was able to copy over everything from the original disk, and
in the process there were quite a few IDE driver problems with the
original drive, IDE bus read errors and resets and the like.  Then I put
the new drive onto the primary IDE all by itself and configured the BIOS
and it works correctly (although the auto-detect got it badly wrong).
I'm now suspecting that the original drive was a bit sick and that was
interfering somehow with the new drive when they were on the same cable.

On 07 May 2001 16:38:36 +1000, Frank Brand wrote:
<snip>
> disk is supported. Have you tried looking for a BIOS upgrade? IIRC I
have

Erm, this is a (roughly) 7 year old DX4/100.  I don't have access to the
facilities required to do BIOS upgrades on this sort of thing any more
8^)

 
> My understanding was that the Linux kernel reads parameters off the
drive so
> that, so long as the drive is recognised by the BIOS (ie. it knows it
has a
> hard drive of some size) then the HDD should be set up correctly by
the
> kernel.

I believe that this is the case, yes, the kernel is supposed to pretty
much ignore what the BIOS tells it wrt drive geometry

Cheers
Michael

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