[NTLUG:Discuss] EZ-BIOS

[MadHat]

Kyle_Davenport at compusa.com wrote:
> 
> No, I think if the bios doesn't recognize the whole hard drive, installing boot
> on the first part of it won't help (you will still see only 8 GB of it).   If
> you install EZ-Bios, linux will not see the same (virtual) addresses on the hard
> drive.  Your best bet is a bios upgrade.

Actually,  Linux doesn't use the BIOS to determin the size of the
drive.  I know it is possible to have a larger drive than what the bios
recognises and have Linux take advantage of it.

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Large-Disk.html

Specifically,
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Large-Disk-4.html#ss4.1

"Linux does not use the BIOS, but some other systems do. The BIOS, which
predates LBA times, offers with INT13 disk I/O routines that have
(c,h,s) as input. (More precisely: AH selects the function to perform,
CH is the low 8 bits of the cylinder number, CL has in bits 7-6 the high
two bits of the cylinder number and in bits 5-0 the sector number, DH is
the head number, and DL is the drive number (80h or 81h). This explains
part of the layout of the partition table.) "

So the suggestion of putting the boot sector in the first part of the
disk is correct (if I am reading the problem correctly).

> 
> Hard drives are already a system bottleneck - it's silly to add another
> translation layer.
> 
> Dale Massey <dmassey at utdallas.edu> on 09/20/99 08:22:40 AM
> 

-- 
MadHat