[wellylug] HD size limit

[jumbophut]

On 4/25/05, E.Chalaron wrote:
> I have a 333 Mhz Celeron here and was wondering if this kind of old machine
> could stand a HD bigger than 40 Gb and / or if Linux  could it get Ok even if
> the bios can't figure out the complete size (e.g. 33 or something out of
> let's say 40 or 80)

The usual rule is 'yes', although you will probably need to stick the
boot manager (lilo/grub) on the boot sector or in the first x Gb of
disk, where x is a number which is smaller than the largest size the
BIOS can handle.

I've had no problems using a 20GB HD in a really old machine which
claimed not to support bigger than about (I seem to remember) 8GB,
using RedHat or Debian.

In the event you have problems, booting from a floppy/CD should get
you to a point where you can access the whole drive, since Linux
doesn't really use the BIOS past bootup.

As usual, YMMV.

-- 
Tony (echo 'spend!,pocket awide' | sed 'y/acdeikospntw!, /l at omcgtjuba.phi/')