On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 12:07:25PM -0600, David Elliott wrote:
> >
> > 2) Users issues a bogus geometry to the BIOS and we ignore it and use the
> > entire disk.
> >
>
> HEHEHEHE... yeah... right.. live in your dream world where you can do that.
> Unfortunately it seems that the BIOS checks the LBA capacity no matter what
> you tell it, so it locks up no matter what you do unless you have that jumper
> installed.
Andre proposed option 2 as the solution for BIOSes that don't hang, but
nonetheless fail to recognize drives >32GB correctly (these are the older
non-Award BIOSes, AFAIK).
Since you seem to have Windows on this drive, I assume it is the first drive
(primary master) in your the system. You are right, then you can do nothing
more than install the capacity jumper. (You can not just disable the drive in
the BIOS to prevent the BIOS from hanging, as I do. I boot Linux from a tiny
boot partition on my first drive, which my BIOS sees. I have told lilo the
drive geometry with 'append="hdb=4982,255,63"'. This tells the kernel the
"correct" geometry and the IDE driver can access my drive.)
As a last resort you might want to try looking for alternative BIOSes from
other vendors that work for your board (something like Mr BIOS). But with
today's chipset diversity, I doubt that you'll find one.
> Okay, and now for something somewhat unrelated:
> The only way I can leave the jumper off the drive and still boot is to remove
> the drive completely from the BIOS. If I do that, then the only thing I can
> boot is the floppy drive. So would it be possible to make a floppy with
> something like EZ-Drive on it? And would EZ-Drive actually pick up the
> hard-drive and act as a BIOS for it even though it is not defined at all in
> the real BIOS? I wouldn't mind leaving the disk in the drive for reboots.
If you can install EZ-Drive on a floppy, this should work. EZ-Drive
effectively takes over all the BIOS calls that try to access your hard drive.
You need to configure it as usual, and it should just work.
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