AMD K6 and big HDD

[Neil Schneider]

The bios only matters for boot. If the kernel is within the section of the
drive that the bios sees, then it will boot. Once the LINUX kernel boots,
it no longer depends upon the bios for access to the drive. Several people
in KPLUG have put large drives, that the bios saw as having only 1024
cylinders, and the entire drive was available, once the kernel booted.
That's the reason for the /boot partition on many systems.

begin quoting DJA :
> No, no, no, no, *NO*!!!
> 
> If the BIOS does not support large drives, no kernel in the world will 
> be able to access any portion of that drive past the 32GB limit. No 
> amount of fiddling with the kernel is going to fix this, because it is 
> essentially a hardware/firmware problem on the motherboard, not an 
> operating system problem. If the BIOS or onboard chipset does not 
> support >32GB drives, the drive will not even be presented to the OS.
> 
> And this all applies whether the drive is to be a boot device or just a 
> data (slave) device.
> 
> Large drive support varies from mobo to mobo, and is often dependent on 
> the BIOS. If your board does not see this drive then you have few options:
> 
> 1) Update the BIOS, providing that a newer BIOS supports large drives.
>    If no such support is available, you are stuck with options two or
>    three below.
> 
> 2) clip the drive to 32GB by changing the appropriate jumper on the
>    drive itself. All new drives larger than 32GB have this jumper.
> 
> 3) Get a new motherboard.
> 
> Sorry folks, there're no ifs, ands, or buts on this one.
> 
> 
> John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
> 
> >Michael J McCafferty set us up the following:
> >
> >>Anyone know off the top of their head if an AMD K6 2 300Mhz era
> >>board/BIOS supports large drives (~ 60GB).
> >>
> >
> >even if the board does not, the kernel will.
> >
> >you may not be able to boot from the huge drive, but a floppy, cdrom,
> >netboot, or smaller (BIOS recognisable) hard drive can take care of that
> >problem for you.
> >
> >-john
> >
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
>    Best Regards,
>       ~DJA.
> 
> 
> -- 
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-- 
Neil Schneider 				    neil at racksaver.com
					   http://www.racksaver.com

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