I have an old computer at my parent's home. I bougth there the chippest mainboard (don't even remember which one). Everything had worked great before my old hard drive (40 GB) has broken down. So I bought a new one (160 GB, it is probably seagate one - I really don't remember that hardware because I don't work on it).

The bios of that mainboard has a limitation to 137 GB so I thought that the problem of long delay before booting a system and detection (bios doesn't recognize hdd) will disappear after flashing the bios. I installed new bios but it has the same limitation. I know that linux doesn't use bios so I tasted new hard drive with a knoppix cd. Everything works great, linux support a biger hdd. I can write/read on it.

The problem is that the only way to boot a system (that I've tested) is to put a bootable cd with a grub into cd/dvd-rom and boot the system from hdd then. And if I want to use Windows, I have to use VMWare/Qemu, etc.

Is there any other way to boot from my hdd. I've heard that there is something like Ontrack Disk Manager which can break that 137GB limit:

www . ontrack . fr / diskmanager / comparaison . aspx

I don't know how it would cooperate with linux. Perhaps there may be a different safe way using hdparm that tell the bios and windows that they work with a smaller hdd and use full hdd with linux o/s?

I suggest you set harddisk manually in BIOS. Use livecd to obtain the real geometry of the disk, then set it in BIOS having the same number of heads and sectors. Set cylinders to maximum your system supports. You should be able to boot system as long as /boot partition is within visible range - multiple 0.5*allowable_cyls*heads*sectors to get visible range measured in kilobytes.

HTH

1. I'll check it on friday/saturday. What shall I do if that fail?
2. Have you heard about alternative bios?

if it's a certain brand then it can run openbios...

nevermind, double-post

I've solved that problem. I just set the jumper on my 160GB hdd in a Single position. Bios can see 137GB right now and Windows as well. And the linux still see 160GB
I just had to repartitionate my hdd and put FAT32 partitions at the beginning.

R.