Morning (at least at this side of the world)

I have a PC from 1999 with Asus P5A-B motherboard and AMD K6-III processor. Original HD is 15GB. I bought a new 80GB HD, originally for an other PC, but now I want to use it in the above PC (as a replacement).

The problem: the BIOS is not able to work with HDs greater than 32GB; it gets stuck when detecting it. OK, inserted jumper to limit capacity and the BIOS is happy. But I've thrown away over 50% of the capacity.

Q1
Is there a way to use the full capacity in Linux without updating the BIOS or adding an additional IDE card?
Q2
Anybody experience with the bios 1011beta005 on the P5A-B? The word beta scares me a bit.

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Some additional info:

fdisk -l on the P5A system reports 4111 cylinders while on the 'other' system it reports over 9000 (9773 if I remember correctly) for this HD.

In the 'other' PC it worked fine and I installed Slackware 10.2.
5GB /
256MB swap
30GB /var
40+GB /home

I moved it to the P5A as is. It boots but is not very happy as both /var and /home go over the 32GB boundary.
I tried to run cfdisk on the P5A but it complains that the var-partition ends after the end of the disk and exits. I've tried to force the number of cylinders (cfdisk -c) but it does not make a difference.

Further I've looked at lilo to find a way, but did not see one (maybe did not look good enough).

Why do you not want to update your BIOS? It's a reasonable and good solution.
Asus has a download support webpage specificially for this purpose.

As stated in Q2 in my opening post, the word beta scares me. It might be so tremendously beta it does not allow me to go back to the previous version if it does not work.

How about getting a hard disk that is less than 32 GB?

1) I've already got it
2) Close to impossible to get it; minimum available nowadays seems to be 80 GB.

Just set the hard drive cap. Then to use the full capacity, specify hda=stroke on the boot line to bypass the cap.

I suggest make a partition for /boot that is 16 MB to 64 MB in size. Having /var being 30 GB is a waste of space.

I have a 120 GB hard drive connected to my secondary controller that can handle up to 50 GB. All 120 GB is seen by Linux. I did not have to use any capping.

I recommend setting all hard drives to LBA mode in the BIOS. This will make it easier.

The last bios for almost every Asus board is beta. They tend not to rename them until they start the next beta. So if it is the last beta it never gets renamed. As long as that beta has been around it is stable, otherwise there would have been another beta.

Lazlow

I had a Promise ATA-133 card that I used to make my 60GB drive work in my PII. Its motherboard would only support up to 8.something GB I think and they didn't have a bios update that would let me use any higher. It was an old ISA thing but it did the job... I think I picked it up at a local computer shop for like 10 bucks.

Thanks for the answers. The point of the exercise was to try to do it from Linux as (to my understanding) Linux does not need the BIOS info. Electro gave the possible solution although I have not tried that one yet.

Thanks for the tip on hda=stroke. I will use that the next time (or maybe in the weekend) if I feel like re-installing again.

I'm aware that it works on the secondary controller. I'm using that at the moment. Scored an antique 2GB disk for it, created a 2 GB boot partition on it and placed the rest of the system on the large HD. The motivation for a 30GB /var is that the mysql database in slackware by default resides in /var.
PS Before you're tell me that 2GB for boot is too much , yes, but it's an old slow HD that only needs to make the system boot. I have considered to place the swap there as well, but it might slow the system down (theoratically).

Thanks for that info, will keep it in mind. I did a BIOS update long ago (1999) on this box and can't remember that it was the case. But maybe I did not update to the latest (for the reason being 'beta').

The point of the exercise is/was to try to do it without additional hardware. I failed that point (see reply to Electro).

Hi Wim,

I am not sure how to PM you. But I have a question about some "Serial Port" Code.

I am referring to a response you made on the following thread:]

h t t p://w w w .linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=401713

My question is the following:

If your code opens up the port i.e. COM1: how can we display the information it is reading from that COM port onto the screen?

Thanks for your help.

Please post a new question in the programming section as there's no relation between a 32GB HD limit and this question.

Some info that will be required:
* console app or gui app?
* binary data or text data

Hint: try something yourself first and tell us what does not work.