will linux allow a 40gig HD on a pentII w/ bios max of 6gig HD?
 

i'm not a linux user yet - in the education process.
i'm thinking seriously about giving it a try, but the speed at which i move to linux will be determined by the answer to my question.

during the course of investigating linux, a linux user i had met told me that linux was not dependent upon the motherboard's bios and could handle hard drives larger than the max. supported by the bios.

the reason i ask this, is - i have an old pentium II, 233 mhz machine and a 40gig hard drive, which of course i would like to use as my linux machine, but, of course it wont work if i'm going to be limited to the hard drive maximum of approx. 6 gig imposed by the bios.

your help will be appreciated.

i once had the same situation, Linux recognised the disk ok ! The bios didn't.
( it's of no importance for Linux but you can always(?) update the bios. (see website of mobo-manufaturer ).

egag

"will linux allow a 40gig HD on a pentII w/ bios max of 6gig HD?"

Yes. The only time that Linux uses the BIOS to access a hard drive is during boot if you use the LILO boot loader. In that case you can create a small /boot partition at the beginning of the drive and even LILO will work OK.

"the reason i ask this, is - i have an old pentium II, 233 mhz machine and a 40gig hard drive, which of course i would like to use as my linux machine, but, of course it wont work if i'm going to be limited to the hard drive maximum of approx. 6 gig imposed by the bios."

Several years ago I used a 30G hard drive on a 233 mhz machine which had a 8G (I think) maximum BIOS capability.


---------------------------
Steve Stites

hi warthoglxxv, welcome to lq. the limitation is w/in the bios, linux should recognize the entire hardrive. the thing that may be of importance is to install the bootloader, usually lilo, or grub, to the sectors recognized by the bios.

<edit>just came off of vacation, i'm slow to the draw, but, there is plenty of help here. :D </edit>

As long as the PC boots your okay, but some PC's wont even boot up with a 40gig drive in there... In those cases I put in a cheap pci raid card to get the box to boot...

The limits are 8 gig and 32 gig, depending on the PC BTW... With a P2 they are usually limitted to a 32gig drive...

Just to elaborate on that slightly...the lilo problem/limitation is with old versions. It has been fixed long since. The limitation is actually larger than 6G - its 8.4G (1024 cylenders). So, if the partition containignyour /boot directory is within the first 8.4G of the drive, you should be home free regardless. If you're using the whole disk, your Distro's partitioner will likely assign your "/" (root partition) to the beginning of the drive anyways, so you won't even notice. :D Cheers to getting to the top of the platform. Now for the big dive...