Hi bid,
First of all, this may be of help:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html
Although it is older (2001 and kernel 2.0.8)
It may very well be best for you to make a Knoppix live CD, which has QT_Parted that might do the trick:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=225817
Doesn't specifically mention your problem (that I noticed) but might come in handy anyway for reference:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...icle&artid=121
Quote:
2nd try:
deleted all partitions.
first installed woody creating partitions like this:
50MB /boot
1024MB swap
100GB free
25 GB ext3 for /
(actually there still is about 25 GB free space left after the last partition, cause its only possible to partition the first 137GB)
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Not possible? Google is your friend. The 137 GB is a native problem for NT4 and greater (system barrier). It's not a problem of NTFS though:
ntfs.com. Keep in mind that manufacturer's numbers can be misleading, so you might only actually have around 150 GB of useable space. (See
here.)
The 137GB limit is a BIOS limitation, "
due to the 28-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA), Maxtor lists 3 possible solutions:
Maxtor's answers. You won't be able to do the Intel Application accelerator solution with your non-Intel board I don't guess. Maybe it's as easy as updating XP to Service Pack 1 before trying to recognize stuff above 137GB.
The solution in the article below (also listed by Maxtor) could be helpful if you had/have the hardware for it.
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/di...137_winnt.html
So I get the impression that you can do this even with just Windows, depending on the limitations of the BIOS. Your motherboard looks to be pretty new, so you shouldn't have any problems in the following. If it has problems, you might could flash it (cringe) with a newer version to get the desired support, but I highly doubt it is necessary.
Here is "the answer," from another Large-disk-how-to:
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-1.html
Quote:
Long ago, disks were large when they had a capacity larger than 528 MB, or than 8.4 GB, or than 33.8 GB. These days the interesting limit is 137 GB. In all cases, sufficiently recent Linux kernels handle the disk fine.
Sometimes booting requires some care, since Linux cannot help you when it isn't running yet. But again, with a sufficiently recent BIOS and boot loader there are no problems. Most of the text below will treat the cases of (i) ancient hardware, (ii) broken hardware or BIOS, (iii) several operating systems on the same disk, (iv) booting old systems.
Advice
. . . .
For large IDE disks (over 137 GB): make sure your kernel is 2.4.19/2.5.3 or later.
If LILO hangs at boot time, make sure you have version 21.4 or later, and specify the keyword lba32 in the configuration file /etc/lilo.conf. With an older version of LILO, try both with and without the linear keyword.
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And there are of course more useful comments there. Seems that even if your BIOS doesn't know how to recognize the >137 GB disk space, you just need to have Linux in the <137 GB disk space so that the BIOS can find it to boot up. Linux doesn't use the BIOS, and the ext2 and ext3 formats have no such limitations, so as long as the boot sector is in the lower section you should be okay.
There may be some kind of parameter to force cfdisk to look beyond the 28-bit limitation: LBA48? (see
here with its follow-up response for a starting place to look further) for use in the partitioning.
Here is another older (Feb. 20) post on the topic with cfdisk:
http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbi.../msg00054.html
I think the problems you are having might be related to "normal" boot manager conflicts and not so much due to the 137 GB factor, since you are having them even when you ignore the 137 GB limit. The way I would approach the installation is this, assuming you can't get around the 137GB limit: Install WinXP, and make sure it works. (Personally, I would create one partition for the WinXP system, one for my personal files, and a small (~1GB) FAT32 partition for trading files with Debian just in case there are some NTFS problems later. There is no way your BIOS has the older 1024-cylinder limit, so just install Debian using cfsdisk as normal,
using at least the 2.4 kernel. You might just consider upgrading to the 2.6 kernel after installing via an online apt-get since you have newer hardware. The difficult part is in determining how to let Debian handle boot management. (Actually if I were you I would download at least the first Sarge CD and burn it, and not fool with Woody, since you have new hardware. Woody is from like 2002.) There are more options than this, but here are two:
1) Leave the Windows driver in the MBR. Make the / (root partition) or else /boot bootable, meaning write the boot sector to one of those. Boot after that using a bootable floppy, and then write the necessary configuration file and install it in Windows, and tell boot.ini about the presence of this file. Then you will always load the Windows boot manager on boot, but will have an option to load the file that will point the way to your bootable Linux partition.
2) Just let GRUB handle the booting.
All of that should at least get you started.
Cheers,
Mike