drive question

[Gregory Nowak]

Hello all.

Well, a friend of mine gave me an 8 gb drive to replace the one that
failed recently in my old k5 AMD machine. In case those of you who are
reading this are wondering, yes, I still plan to write the howto on
how to convert zipslack to boot over nfs. It's just that I haven't had
time for more then going to classes, doing homework, eating, and
sleeping for the last few weeks (no, I'm not exaggerating either).

Anyway, I put the drive in. When I start the box, it goes through the
floppy seek, and I can here it accessing the drive. After that, it
just sits there. Back when the 1.2G drive was in there, it went
through the floppy seek, I heard it access the hd, it then gave me the good old "ok" single beep, and
started looking for something from which to load the OS.

Right now, (or at least the last time I had a sightling to look at the
screen), the drive parameters were set to auto detect in CMOS. What
I'm guessing happens now, is that the BIOS sees the new drive, sees
that it is way bigger then 2.1G (which I think is the highest this
bios can handle), and gets confused. So what I'm
guessing I need to do when I have a sighted person here to read the
screen to me, is to go into CMOS, and fool the system into thinking I
have a smaller drive. 

I think I need a cylinder value of 1023, but am not sure what good
numbers would be for heads/track, and sectors, (as well as any other
geometry values I forgot to mention). If someone could either
please provide good figures, or tell me how to figure it out, I would
appreciate it. In case it matters, I plan to have a 10 Mb boot
partition.

Thanks.

Greg


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