I have a running Trustix distro server. Boot drive is a 4 Gig drive. I want to add a 120 GB drive for backup storage for all the other computers in the house.

The catch is the motherboard's BIOS only supports an 8 gig drive. Is BIOS support necessary since this will be a data only drive?

Linux ignores the bios once the kernel has booted, the only thing you need to worry about is if your booting from this drive the kernel must live within a section that the bios can see.

The 120 GB hard drive should be okay. I boot off a 13GB hard drive in a 486 and it works like a charm (granted, 120GB is a lot bigger than 13GB).

I'd plug it in a do no other configuration and see if it works. If it doesn't work, pass:

hda=16383,16,63

as a kernel parameter at boot time (change "hda" to the appropriate drive). This is the magic disk geometry that tells the kernel, "don't use the Cylinder/Head/Sector geometry to calculate the size of the drive, ask the drive itself".

If you need to pass kernel parameters, you'll have to edit /etc/lilo.conf (add the line "append="hda=16383,16,63"" somewhere, again changing "hda" to the appropriate drive), or however grub does it.

Failing all that, see http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk.html.

Lyle

I don't even put anything but my primary drive in the BIOS. It just takes the BIOS longer to start up anyway, the kernel can take care of it.

So it doesn't really matter what the board can support.

But keep in mind that if the board is older, it might not be able to keep up with a newer, faster drive.

I bought a nice shiny new HD so I could play with Linux and keep my win98 stuff (for various reasons)

BIOS confused the hell out me at first, after reading up various internet pages on BIOS setups and Linux, basically all of the above posts are correct, Linux doesn't use the bios for drive info. I just called it a 8 gig drive in the BIOS, went through the linux set-up and hey presto: one dual boot linux/windows system.

The hardest part was finding a local computer shop that sold 6/32 unc screws (something like that) for holding the new hard drive in place! Generally, if you buy an OEM HD it doesn't come with a mounting kit.

Thanks to all who have replied. This is pretty much the answer I expected to hear but couldn't find any place I looked.

I know the drive will probably not perform up to it's peak but that doesn't really concern me for this purpose. I'm sure it will do much better than my tape drive and will be much more convenient.

Once I get it done I'll post again to let you all know how it worked out but I am very encouraged.

Complete Success!

It all went in without any undue fuss. I just set up the BIOS parameters as NORMAL 16383/16/63 and used cfdisk to set up a single 120GB partition.

Motherboard is an Explorer II with an AMD K5-166 and 64 MB SDRAM.

Excellent, don't you just love it when a plan comes together?
Now go and make a post in the Member Success forum with a few details for others who may want to do it :-)