usually yeah, or get the tech specs from the www site from the maker of the drive.. the only barriers i've found with ide are 540(545?)MB 8GB and 32GB haven't encountered/read about problems with stuff inbetween those, although i dont doubt there are some really broken bioses out there.
one of systems i built a few months ago with a 37GB ibm drive did not detect teh drive in the bios, or if it did it didnt show me the geometry of the drive it was just blank, but for some reason i was still able to format and install/use it not only as a bootable drive(with a 6GB bootable partition) but i could (apparently havent really tested it to its full extent) access all 37GB of the drive. and in another case, with a really old computer, the bios stopped recognizing ANY drives at all, and yet when i booted a linux kernel from floppy i could read/write/mount drives no problem. it must of bypassed bios calls to detect the drives, as when i booted to dos and tried fdisk it said 'no fixed disks present'. moral of the stories i guess even if the bios can't see the drive right it still might work :) nate On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Danny Heap wrote: danny >I'm seeing advertisements for IDE drives with over 20 GB capacity. I danny >realize that one of the problems with really large IDE drives has been danny >that BIOS doesn't report the geometry properly. danny > danny >However, if I don't plan to install the drive with any bootable danny >partitions (as a second slave drive, say), then won't the disk danny >geometry be completely understood by the linux kernel, perhaps helped danny >out by some boot parameters? danny > danny >Also, how do I discover the true disk geometry? Can I simply read danny >what's printed on the drive? danny > danny >Some of the large drives I've seen advertised are Maxtor 20.4 GB, danny >Seagate 28 GB, Maxtor 36 GB. And a scsi Seagate 50.1 GB. danny > danny >Thanks for any help danny >Danny Heap danny >[EMAIL PROTECTED] danny > danny > danny >-- danny >Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null danny > ----------------------------------------[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ]-- Vice President Network Operations http://www.firetrail.com/ Firetrail Internet Services Limited http://www.aphroland.org/ Everett, WA 425-348-7336 http://www.linuxpowered.net/ Powered By: http://comedy.aphroland.org/ Debian 2.1 Linux 2.0.36 SMP http://yahoo.aphroland.org/ -----------------------------------------[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ]-- 5:19pm up 167 days, 5:30, 1 user, load average: 1.04, 1.05, 1.06
