I've just got my hand on an old Pentium 133MHz, and thought it'd made a nice fileserver/printserver. I installed my two SeaGate Barracuda 160Gb HDDs on it, and upon booting, i noticed that only 8000Mb of them were detected. I fired up my Gentoo LiveCD, only to discover that the drives weren't there at all.

What i'd like to know is, has anyone run into such a problem before? Is there something that prevents old Pentium from seeing large hard drives? If so, will a fragmentation of the 160 Gb into smaller partitions make it work?

I've searched google extensively, but to no avails.

Any hints/pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

-e0n

that's normal on a machine that old.
partitioning wont help either. if you do the linux right, you should
be able to use all of the drive's space anyway.

Maybe i'm doing something wrong here.. But how could an OS even use all of my drive's space if my BIOS detects only a small fraction of it?

Because linux doesn't really depend that much on the BIOS.

Try this:

Create a small (10-15mb) /boot partition at the start of the drive you'll be using for the OS.

Allocate your other partitions and see what happens. You may need to reboot for the partition table to take. I've often used the first Mandrake 9.1 disk to partition drives on cranky BIOS, partly because I'm lazy - but often because it succeeds where Slack is painful.

Get the one drive working (and space detected) then adding the other should be eas(y/ier)

Haven't used Gentoo myself, but this works with Slack, Mandrake and Debian on older hardware with big (80GB +) disks.