Second hard drive: Part 2

[Robert Brockway]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Madison Kelly wrote:

> Owning an 80GB at the largest I don't have personal experience with
> pushing beyond the BIOS' 128GB limit that Henry spoke about (though I
> knew it exists) however I have in the past accessed and mounted drives
> not seen by the system BIOS... I know a while back when the 8GB limit
> was the issue (and later with the 32GB limit) there where custom boot
> loaders (or such) included with the drives called Disk Drive Overlay
> (DDO) utilities. These allowed you to surpas BIOS limits and the method
> these appas used may be the same methods Linux uses (accessing the
> drives around the BIOS).

Indeed.  Since Linux doesn't really use the bios except to get into about
devices (for the most part) it is possible to pass info to the OS to tell
it to use devices what the hardware is having trouble seeing.  This is how
people got around both the 8GB & 32GB disk problems.

I'm not sure if this will also work for a problem related to >128GB
drives, but the original poster could look into the use of disktab to pass
info about drives to the OS.  IIRC there are also parameters you can pass
to lilo to get it to see drives in a certain way too.  Been ages since
I've had to mess with that stuff though.

Rob

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Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
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