drive question

Luke Davis ldavis at shellworld.net
Thu Sep 18 23:03:57 EDT 2003


How old is the computer?  Can you do a flash of the BIOS?

You are suggesting, that one can lie to the CMOS, boot the system on a
small portion of the drive, and then Linux will be able to access the
entire drive, despite the BIOS?  Interesting, I didn't think that worked.

Luke


On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Gregory Nowak wrote:

> 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
>
>
>

-- 
In memory of The Man In Black.  His music will live forever!




More information about the Speakup mailing list