Hi guys!
My question is: will my Abit-ST6 motherboard (from 2001) support a 320 Gb P-ATA HDD? This mobo supports UDMA-100. I read in an earlier BIOS update, (I have the latest available) that 137 Gb HDD and above HDDs are supported. This update was released in 2002. It seems that I already answered my question, but there is a "but". "137 Gb and above are supported" was written, but it wasn't written that this "above" is how much (you know 320 Gb is not a little bit bigger than 137, but MUCH bigger). I don't wanna buy this HDD until I'm not 100% sure, that it will work.
I know, that the easiest way to find out is to go to the shop with the PC and try out the HDD, but the thing is, that I don't wanna take it anywhere if not absolutely necessary.
Does anybody have such old MoBo with such new HDD inside?
Thanks.

The 137 GB limit was caused by the old LBA addressing which was limited to 28 bits. 2^28 * 512 bytes/sector = 137438953472 = 137GB (In hard drive manufacturer math).

If your BIOS supports drivers larger than 137 GB, then it is using 48 bit addressing. 2^48 * 512 bytes/sector = 144115188075855872 = 144 PB (In hard drive manufacturer math).

If you find a drive that large, please post a notice to the LQ forums.

Well, thanks. Now, I'm 100% sure that this new drive will work with my old MoBo. Thanks again.

Glad we could help. It is also always nice to hear back if the answer we provide works. Please let us know if the hard drive works so everyone else using these forums will benefit from your experience.

I know what you you're talking about... I know, because most of times I don't hear back anything, when I reply to somebody's problem. You know, I don't ask too many times on these forums, I reply instead, so I really know what did you mean when you said About the HDD: I will write of course, if it will work or not. If I don't write anything, it will mean that I didn't buy the HDD because of money shortage (I'm a student )

Well, hi again.
I'm glad to say, that I bought that 320G HDD, and it works perfectly with my old MoBo. No problems occurred. I'm just informing everybody, as I promised previously.

Linux does not use the BIOS to gather hard drive geometry. You can use a 1 TiB hard drive on a 486 system and it will still work. Though the boot partition have to be smaller than the BIOS limits, but there is no sky limit when the Linux kernel is loaded.

Well, its good to know. Thanks.

BIOS loads the bootstrap code that loads Linux. That is why you see the default partition layout for most distros use a small "/boot" partition and then the rest of the drive is "/". For those of us who like to keep everything on one partition, the size of the drive supported by BIOS is important. This allows us to make "/boot" just another directory, instead of a separate partition. It also makes it easier to boot multiple operating systems off of the same hard drive. If you already have another operating system on the drive, you may not be able to guarantee that your "/boot" will be located inside the limits of your BIOS's addressing range.

What Electro says is correct, but not everyone is using the defaults when they install a distro. I know I never do.