[vox-tech] resizing harddrive

[Mike Simons]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 12:44:20AM -0800, Ryan wrote:
> Currently my BIOS only allows me to see 32GB of my harddrive.
[...]
> is there an easy way to make linux recognize the full size of the drive 
> without having to format the harddrive or do anything that will result
> in a loss of data?

  Linux should be able to use the full size of that hard drive 
even on machines with BIOSes that can't because Linux doesn't use
the BIOS to access hard drives.  The only time it uses the BIOS is
right at the beginning to detect the capacity, which it then asks
the drive about and believes the drive.

  The important thing is some BIOSes crash when a drive that is 
"too large" is auto-detected.  So on some BIOSes you need to tell it
that there is no drive attached, or manually tell it the size is
something much smaller than it really is.

- So have you tried booting Linux on that machine?
- Does the BIOS hang when you try to detect the drive size, or just
  mis-report the drive size?

    TTFN,
      Mike