Hi, I have a 60GB hard drive (WD) in a old Pentium2 and there isn't a BIOS update to fix the 32 GB barrier. Fdisk tell me that the drive has 4xxx (i don't remerber the last 3 digits) cylinders and show a NTFS partition with 7xxx cylinder (currently a Windows partition)

I want to create 3 partitions:

A 32 Mb for the boot (ext2)
512 mb for swap
rest of the disk for data (ReiserFS)

Does the only solution is to set the boot partiton FAT and install the WD utility to fix the BIOS limitation ?

You could also buy an IDE PCI controller card and use that.

Have you tried using linux fdisk. Sometimes it will ignore the BIOS and if you divide the HD into <32GB partitions, even windows will recognize them, but maybe not DOS fdisk.

lunux' fdisk will not use the bios. it will recognize your whole disk so
you can use that for partitioning.
but i don't know if lilo is still restricted to the first 1024 cilinders. if so, yout /boot-part. must be completely below that limit.

egag

yes. I'm talking about Linux Fdisk

I don't know if Fdisk ignore the BIOS, but the drive reporting himself as a 32GB (jumper setting). I need to do so because otherwise the system freeze at startup.
Maybe that's why i can't create a partition after 41xx cylinders (the disk is over 7000 cylinders).



Yeah i could, but i won't invest money on an Old Pentium 2 computer. The controler card will cost me 40$can, and a new motherboard (for cheap AthlonsXP) 95$can.


The easiest way seems to create a new fat partition (32 Mb for the boot) with the WD utility and add the BIOS fix and then create the swap/ReiserFS partiton using Fdisk.