Bigger hard drives in old machines, was Re: [ltp] Spare HDD for TP760XL

[wes schreiner]

Cynthia Eliason wrote:

>On Saturday 22 January 2005 12:50 pm, Mendel Cooper wrote:
>  
>
>>I believe that the largest HD that the 760XL BIOS can recognize is 4 GB,
>>and you might have trouble with a larger one.
>>    
>>
>
>  I hadn't considered this in my plans for my 3 thinkpads.  I have a TP 600 
>with a 3G drive, and for Christmas  I bought a used A20M with a 12G drive, 
>and by mistake I bought a 701C Butterfly with no HD at all. (Impulse buy on 
>EBay, I failed to read the fine print!)   I bought a new 20G drive and put it 
>in the A20M, it is working fine.  My plan is to put the 12G drive in the 600, 
>and move the 3G drive into the Butterfly.  
>   Is this plan going to work, or will I have problems with drives being 
>incompatible?    
>   
>  
>

You won't have any problems with those hard drives in those machines.  
The problem with large hard drives in old computers is that the 
computer's BIOS may be limited as to how much of the hard drive it can 
access.  At least the first stage of any boot loader needs to go through 
the BIOS to access the hard drive.  One solution is to have the bootable 
partition(s) as the first partition(s) and limit their size to what the 
BIOS can see.  Once Linux boots it can access the entire drive, because 
it doesn't go through the BIOS.  Different versions of Windows have 
different drive size limitations, but you won't have any problems with 
those drives on W98SE or newer.

wes