Do you think I can fix the issue and circumvent the BIOS by passing the real geomerty of the drive as kernel boot parameters? This may also have the nice side effect that I could utilize the full capacity of the drive. I'll definitly do some experiments in this direction and let you know immediately if I succeed. Please let me know if this may be a waste of time or if you know an appropriate fix.I retried with the boot parameter hda=16383,16,63 according to the values that I got from fdisk, but without success. Anyway, I would have expected that the kernel may have had a way to set the LBA48 geometry instead of CHS, but it looks like I'm on the wrong track here... begin:vcard