Big disk in old bios

[Eric Cyr]

One - There's an option in most BIOSes (called LBA, if I remember correctly)
that will help them handle drives over 137G. It might be there, but turned
off.  Might at least save you the re-install.


On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 8:02 PM, Russell McOrmond <russell at flora.ca> wrote:

>
>   I was trying to install 8.04LTS on a friends machine today.  He
> already had Windows XP, so we bought a new disk which we installed to
> become the Linux disk.  It is a 7-year old machine, and the disk we got
> was a 200G disk.
>
>   We ran into the problem where the BIOS didn't recognize this large
> disk.  I've seen this before -- I have other machines with 160G disks in
> them which the BIOS believes are 130G disks.  After I tried installing
> anyway, I got the famous "Grub loading, please wait ... Error 18"
> message.  I ended up needing to boot FreeDOS and do an 'fdisk /mbr' to
> get rid of GRUB just to leave the machine such that it could boot XP again.
>
>
>   I notice that the default Ubuntu install was to set up a small SWAP
> space and a / which filled the rest of the disk.  I've seen this problem
> before, and the solution (which is actually the default for Fedora) is
> to make a small /boot partition at the beginning of the disk such that
> everything the boot loader needs is always accessible by the BIOS.
>
>   I'm curious why Ubuntu doesn't do this?  I'm having to go back and
> try installing again at another date (after spending far too long this
> afternoon), and I'm going to be doing a manual partitioning where I'll
> set up /boot properly.   I guess I expected Ubuntu to just handle this,
> as this is the type of partitioning issue which average desktop users
> might run into fairly often.
>
>   Thoughts?
>
> --
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