[vox-tech] resizing harddrive

[Ryan]

On this machine the drive comes up right away as having 32MB. It's an old
motherboard, 1995 or so and even after I specified in the BIOS the number of
heads and cylinders there is another option in the BIOS that says Max Size: 8GB
So when I went and did an fdisk/mkfs,  the size of the drive is 32GB. Everything
works fine, I just want my 10 extra gigs. So I should be able to get around the
BIOS issue in linux?


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Simons" <msimons@moria.simons-clan.com>
To: <vox-tech@lists.lugod.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 27, 2003 11:08 AM
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] resizing harddrive


> 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
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