[plug] BIOSes, >32Gig HDDs & Linux

[Bernard Blackham]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 11:37:09PM +0800, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> >Is it possible to access the full size of this drive from within linux, 
> >without the BIOS support? If so - how?
> 
> As an experiment, I removed the limiter Jumper, disabled the HDD in the 
> BIOS, and booted into Linux - which detected the HDD fine, and now 
> reports it at 40Gig. And reading the existing partition works without IO 
> errors. Yay!
> 
> So the question is, I suppose, now: Is this correct, and safe? ^_^
> Can I rely on Linux to correctly handle this HDD for its full capacity, 
> even tho the BIOS wants nothing to do with it?

This is exactly what I did with an 80Gb drive in a P-66 era machine
for a few years. It never missed a beat until I killed its PSU :(

Well, actually, the only quirk was that the boot process would hang
in BIOS stages on a warm boot (or even a cold boot from software).
It had to be a power-on boot for it to stop the BIOS from freezing
up. Once it had booted though, it was solid until it's death.

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham <bernard at blackham dot com dot au>