Hi This is probablya BIOS question but the Debian community seems to be very knowledgable so I give it a try. (I sent this question to Intel but they have not responded).
The problem: Problems downsizing primary master IDE HD from 30.7Gb to 4.3Gb. I have used my AL440LX motherboard with an PII 300MHz for three years with two Fujitsu 4.3 GB as Master and Slave on the primary IDE channel. An Atapi CDROM as master on the second. Have had win95 and later win98 on the first drive, linux on the second. Recently I bought a 30.7 GB IBM drive and replaced the Master drive. Installed win98 second edition and everything worked fine, the whole drive was found, I could boot win98 or Debian GNU/Linux through LILO as before, etc. To use some software installed on the original Fujitsu drive I replaced the new drive with the Fujitsu. Then problems began. The bios did not identify either of the disks on the primary channel. I checked again the master slave settings and moved the small drives one by one as slaves to the secondary channel where both were corectly identified and accessible. Switching cables did not help either. When I moved them back to the primary channel they were not recognized. A complete bios reset (restoring defaults, not updateing) did not help. So I installed the big drive again and viola! Now it worked. The symptom was repeatable. My question is: Whats going on? Have the BIOS overwritten some variable values or what? The IDE devices are recognized by the BIOS (when everything works) as IBM-DTLA-305030-(PM) FUJITSU-MPB3043APU-(PS) FX240S-(SM) Any input welcome, Anders
