HELP!!! maybe.....

[James Wilkinson]

Evans F. Mitchell wrote:
> Problem one: installed a 15 gig HD and fedora (or the bios) is calling
> it an 8 gig'r. guess I need to set
> the bios on the right peramaters....

Phil Schaffner wrote:
> Either that or drive jumpers.  Have you updated to the latest BIOS?

If Fedora's calling it an 8 GB hard drive, I suspect that it has been
jumpered to 8 GB. Phil's advice is good: check for BIOS updates, and
check the way the drive is jumpered.

There have been a number of BIOS limitations on the size of IDE drives
throughout the history of IDE. One of them was 8 GB. If you are lucky,
you can set the drive to 15 GB, but the BIOS may detect the drive as an
8 GB drive, and boot under that assumption.

In this case, you will need to create a /boot or root partition,
probably as a primary partition, very early on in the boot sequence.
I'd recommend /dev/hda1: keep this partition under 500 MB.

Linux will boot from this, and then ignore the BIOS' limited view of the
drive. It will be able to detect other partitions on the rest of the
drive. You may want to set up the rest of the drive as LVM, or (at
least) set up a /var, /usr and /home partition.

If you are unlucky, the BIOS will completely refuse to boot if it
detects a hard drive larger than 8 GB. You *might* be able to use a
smaller drive for the boot partition, and just tell the BIOS to
completely ignore the 16 GB hard drive. Or the BIOS might just refuse to
co-operate.

This is where the jumpers on the back of the hard drive come in: they
tell the drive to behave as an 8 GB drive. This allows the system to
boot, but Linux still will not be able to see the remaining 7 GB. If you
have to use this route, you are stuck with only using 8 GB.

Otherwise, your best option is a plugin bootable IDE adapter.

James.

(Note: "gigabyte" tends to have a number of definitions where hard
drives are concerned. I'm blithely ignoring them for the purposes of
this e-mail.)
-- 
E-mail address: james | When I was young I wanted to be a fireman, but I
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | dropped that idea when they explained to me that
                      | firemen don't actually make fires.
                      |     -- Konqi the dragon, KDE's mascot