I apologize in advance for the length of this post. I'm a Linux newbie and I'm not sure if this is as complicated as think, but here it goes anyway. I have a 160 Gb Seagate hard drive that has Ubuntu installed on it. I took it out of my old machine that I took apart after my Soyo motherboard bit the dust. I'm now building a new system with a Gigabyte GA-BX2000 motherboard. I have my 160 Gb HD connected to my primary IDE bus. My problem with this is that my HD was too big for the BIOS to recognize (it would just freeze), so I switched the jumper on the back of the HD to limit the size to 32 Mb (This also made the drive "primary slave" because the jumper is off the "Master" setting). I'm thinking that I need to update the BIOS for it to be able to handle a bigger drive. Anyway, BIOS is fine with the current jumper setting on the HD. Ubuntu will not boot now (sync problem, I guess because I changed the jumper on the hard drive??), so I'm trying to install Slackware 10.2. After I log in as 'root' and get to the prompt to partition the disk, I type in

fdisk /dev/hdb (hdb because HD is "primary slave")

I get a message that there is so many cylinders, more than 1024, blah, blah, blah. and then I get an error:
"Unable to seek on /dev/hdb"

I've also tried

cfdisk /dev/hdb and get this error:

"FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 0. Partition ends after end-of-disk"

I'm thinking this may be because I changed the jumper to set the HD to 32 Mb. Do I need to erase the HD, reconfigure it, take a baseball bat to it or what?
Very confused as I'm new to this partitioning thing.
Any help is appreciated, thanks!

Personally I'd fix up the BIOS.
When in doubt, use "fdisk -l" (that's ell as in list).

You'll probably find your disk is /dev/hda - nothing to do with the "slave" setting.
In this case.

fdisk -l returns the same error:

"Unable to seek on /dev/hdb"

Is there a way to update the bios from the bios screen? Or do I need to install an operating system like Windows and then flash the bios to update? I found the update for my motherboard, but it looks like I need Windows installed or at least DOS.

Sorry, of course it's hdb ... d'oh.
If you have nothing on that disk you want to keep, try
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1 count=510"

This will zero the boot code, and the partition table.
Then try cfdisk again and see what it thinks it is.
BTW make sure the BIOS has the disk as LBA (or AUTO maybe).

As for doing the BIOS, generally (recent) motherboard should have a CD that should allow updates.
Failing that go get a DOS boot image (off the net) and dd that to a floppy. Then you can boot that and do the flash.
There may be legal issues with this if you don't have a MS-DOS (or Windose) license. Best might be to look for a DR-DOS image; I've seen them somewhere.

Nice! I typed in what you said:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1 count=510

That's the answer I was looking for.
I can use both fdisk and cfdisk to partition now. I thought I was going to have to get a new hard drive or something. As far as the BIOS goes, I do have it set to AUTO and it works fine with the jumper setting on the HD. I'll try switching the jumper after I upgrade the BIOS. I have the floppy ready, but for now it's on to installing Slackware 10.2.

Thanks for your help!