I've got an old IBM T40 that also came with an HPA. http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Hidden_Protected_Area

It can be disabled in BIOS. Does your laptop have a similar option? Also, just out of curiosity what is the output from Note that's a lowercase "L"

Checked the Phoenix BIOS version 53.01.03 again. Perused every screen and see no option to change the HPA. Nothing mentions HPA or Predesktop area or LBA 48. bummer There isn't much available to tweak with in this BIOS.

Strange, I am able to select the hard drive in my BIOS which it recognizes automatically as a WD3200BEVE. But when I select that drive and go into that submenu it freezes t he BIOS and I must power cycle. Maybe another indication that it has trouble with larger drives.

I have looked all over the Gateway site and found no BIOS upgrade.

Also, maybe I am doing this wrong but from a Linux Terminal, When I type

fdisk -l

I get no output at all. Any other ways to get fdisk to see the partitions?

doh:~$ fdisk -l
doh:~$ fdisk -v
fdisk (util-linux-ng 2.14.2)

Try running fdisk with root privs

Perhaps a stupid question...

Have you tried google to find a newer BIOS on other than the Gateway support site?

If you cannot find a newer edition of your BIOS, and it seems to hang, but can find the present edition, you could download a new copy and reinstall the present BIOS. Is this your current BIOS?

http://notebook.driversdown.com/note.../s_980_1.shtml

I found this post that seems to divide the problem into two parts, 48-bit LBA support and not recognizing more that 137GB.

http://www.wimsbios.com/phpBB2/topic8931.html

You might try to look at the setting and on the first page of the BIOS after the menu page, where the HDD is detected or its parameters can be set. Look to see if there is anything that can be opened or expanded to give you more options, one of which might be LBA. I too had a machine with a 137GB limit, but I found it would support LBA when I finally found my way to it. A machine that is no older than four to five years could be expected to have 48-bit LBA support.

If you can achieve LBA, the second demand seems to be that linux be installed within the first 137GB. You have tried putting boot and home there, but I might try to set up linux with three partitions (swap,/,/home) all within the 137GB limit, booting the system, then using its linux partitioner to expand the /home partition beyond 137GB, hoping that you both get boot and more than 137GB.

Agree with thorkelljarl: Try installing linux in a 20GB (first) partition, then create another partition as /data for the rest of the drive after you have successfully booted. Though I am concerned if you can't see the whole drive from a liveCD. If that doesn't work, then I guess you're stuffed.

This is due to imaging a drive with a hidden area for the manufacturer's stuff. Use sleuthkit to adjust/remove the HPA, it's in the ubuntu repos.

heh, but I came across it as one of the top google results for my problem, figure other people still want the answer. The disk_stat tool that worked for me in lucid is removed from the newer version of sleuthkit in maverik, by the way, but I tried the setmax.c program and it worked as well when hdparm did not.

Oh, and at least on Dells you have to wipe out lba3, otherwise it will re-add the HPA when you boot. I used 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 seek=3'

http://www.sleuthkit.org/informer/sl...former-17.html

Hey it's nice to know that there are people out there that care if us newbies can google and findthe answers to our problems. I find that in this forum there are a lot of people who will help us when we need it.