Bios does not recognize hard drive when formatted in ext2
 

Hi there, I'm a newbie (obviously) and am bound and determined to start getting Linux up and running. Like a lot of people, I chose an older computer I could fuss with, a 500mhz 256meg ram machine, and decided to install Puppy on a spare 40meg hard drive I have, as my bios does not boot from usb...I think...

Anyway, I have found that my bios does not recognize the hard drive when formatted to ext2! I have taken the drive and formatted it back to ntfs, and my bios recognizes it, and then back again to ext2, and nope, it's not there, thus I am still booting puppy from the cd...sigh...

Is my bios so out of date that I'm just out of luck? Is there anyway to check this?

I've been at this for a while, I've searched the internet and various Linux forums high and low, and haven't found anything.

The motherboard manufacturer's web site should have BIOS firmware available for download. At post time when your machine is booting, look for the version number of the BIOS (you have to be quick, and it may take a few tries :) ). If you have an older version than listed on the manufacturer's site, you should probably flash it, according to the manufacturer's instructions. If you get stuck, post back.

Please confirm the following
1) Linux Version
2) have you mount the cdrom
3) You are using GUI or CLI?

Come on if you can format it then the Bios has recognised it and allowed you to use it.

What you are telling us may be a MS Windows can't see it. That is true because you need a driver to read a Ext2/3 partition in Windows. You can also see the partition in the Disk Management program.

If you don't see it in Linux then it is because you haven't mounted it and assume an Ext2/3 partition will be automatically mounted. This command, to be issued in root, confirms it is there
A 40Mb hard disk is indeed very old.

I'll try to address the responses:

1. Brucehinrichs:"The motherboard manufacturer's web site should have BIOS firmware available for download.". I checked the HP site and the only thing they have available is an audio and a video driver, no bios update. I tried the Phoenix site and they have no links to bios updates (mine is Phoenix 4.0 release 6.0 revision 1.09 1/27/00).

2. davinders: 1) Linux Version: Puppy 4.3.1 (works fine off of CD!)
2) have you mount the cdrom: I think this means did I run it off the CDrom...yes, runs fine, I really like it.
3) You are using GUI or CLI? Don't understand the question, but I think GUI means Graphical User Interface.

3. saikee: "Come on if you can format it then the Bios has recognised it and allowed you to use it." I formatted it from the cd, after I did that and rebooted and got the "No OS found" message, I checked the bios set up screen, and the bios no longer lists a hard drive at all, when I select "auto" or "user" in the bios main menu, it keeps coming back under the hard disk with "none".
"What you are telling us may be a MS Windows can't see it". I don't know, I haven't tried to format another hard drive with windows, and add the linux ext2 drive as a slave and look at it with windows. I really don't care if windows can see it, I want the bios to see the ext2 formatted hard drive. Which has Puppy installed on it.
"If you don't see it in Linux then it is because you haven't mounted it and..." I can see the ext2 formatted hard drive just fine when I run Puppy from the disk, but I can't get my bios to recognize the ext2 formatted hard drive. And so when I boot it after setting it to boot from the hard drive first, it keeps coming up "No OS found".
"A 40Mb hard disk is indeed very old." Oops, my bad, it's 40gig, I must have had meg on my mind!

agfrag,

The Bios has no interest in what is inside a hard disk. Its only concern is how to arrange it in an order sequence. A raw disk with nothing can still be still by the Bios.

I would suggest you re-plug the electrical connections again. There is no reason why the same disk can be seen from a Live CD, which must obtain the disk information (say it is disk #1 from controller X), before it can format the disk for you and then disappears at another time. The filing system should not be blamed as technically it doesn't make sense.

Another reason why a hard suddenly cannot be read is that it is on its way out.