Large disk: bios autodetects, fdisk not?
 

I got a 17 Gb hard disk.
BIOS autodect hard disc function shows that it has 2110 cylinders and its size is 17Gb.
In spite of this, the fdisk of both SuSe Linux 6.4 and Win98 tells me it has 1024 cylinders and its size is 8Gb.
Did I reach a BIOS limit (in spite that autodetect harddisk shows the correct geometry and my bios is UDMA4 capable) or is it fdisk's fault?

I think it's just an old fdisk on both cases.

It seems that it was because of the BIOS:
- the same Win98 (and fdisk) can easily handle not 17G but 40G in an other, newer machine.
- removing the Win98 partition Linux now sees the entire disk (doing
that it does not rely on BIOS, and it no longer needs to take into account the BIOS-binded Win98 system on the same disk)
Now, I am going to give the entire disk to Linux (instead of using only half of it).
If I copy the Linux partitions somehow (how?) from hda2 and hdb to hdc, will Linux be bootable even after removal of hdb? (I am afraid then hdc becomes hdb and the boot loader will no longer find Linux.)

Linux should be bootable. But it's a good idea to make a boot disk, because you'll need to reinstall lilo on new partition. You also need to make changed in /etc/fstab to look for hdc, not hdb.
You can copy all Linux partitions manually (but it's not very easy). The solution I see now: copy all your data from Linux to ne partition (maybe your /home), install a fresh copy on hdc and copy your files/configuration in the right places.

I installed a fresh system on hdc, taking the opportunity to upgrade to SuSe 7.3.
It is great!