Olaf Dabrunz wrote:
> 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).
>
This would have to be a fairly old BIOS like not even recognizing > 8 GB drives or
something.
>
> 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.
>
Mr BIOS is doing a beta test for the BX boards now. I might as well send it in
and see if it is any good.
>
> > 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.
I dunno, I am trying to figure out how to do this, EZ-Drive doesn't seem to have a
make floppy disk option.
The other option is to possibly slave a 200 MB hard drive and put EZ-Drive on that
and disable the BIOS for the first drive. That should let it boot the 200 MB and
run EZ-Drive which should then effectively switch the drives. If it doesn't then
LILO can take care of that after EZ-Drive is loaded. It looks like this is
probably going to be an option.
-Dave
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Mar 31 2000 - 21:00:28 EST