I wanted to add a 120 GB hard drive to my linux server to accept backup images from my various other PCs running various variants of Windows. Samba was running and I could store stuff there but the 4 GB drive wasn't going to be enough. My concern was that the motherboard BIOS had no clue about anything larger than an 8 GB hard drive.

Doing this turns out to be pretty easy if you know the secret "lie" for the BIOS. After physically installing the disk I manually configured the BIOS in "NORMAL" mode with the geometry of 16383/16/63. This geometry tells fdisk (or cfdisk) to ask the drive what the real geometry is. I booted the system and used cfdisk to create the one giant partition, created the file system (EX3), added a mount point, and then mounted it. Great success!

The motherboard is an Explorer II with an AMD-K5 166 with 64 MB SIMMs running Trustix 2.0. This whole setup is to switch my current tape backups (from one of the Windows PCs) over to the linux server allowing multiple simultaneous and unattended backups. Backup time was also cut considerably.