A friend of mine wants to upgrade his 7 year old Linux box with a new shiny 750 GB hard drive.

If I remember correctly, this was the era when LBA-48 was introduced to accommodate 130 GB+ hard drives.

Is there a way or a utility to check if his old machine supports this.

The main board is a K7S5A
The IDE controller (according to lshw): SIS 5513
And the BIOS: America Megatrend 07.00T 04/02/01

All currently connected HDs are < 100 GB.

I did some googleing and did not find a definitive answer. I found a Windows tool to check for LBA-48, but this machine does not run windows. Some people state that there are BIOS versions for this mother board that do support it, and some versions that don't.

Is there a Linux tool that can check for this, or a site listing the BIOS/mother board capabilities?

Any info is appreciated...

Thank you

Sure there is a way. Just add the new shiny 750 GB hard drive and if the BIOS sees only 137GB then you know you need to upgrade the BIOS.

And then again, maybe not. Linux will see the drive in full capacity even if BIOS doesn't. Just make sure the boot partition is in the beginning of the disk in the area fully seen by BIOS.