On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, dizzy wrote:
Jon Pennington wrote:
Hi, everybody!
I was hoping that somebody could tell me if it's possible or not (and hopefully how to) remove EZBios from a disk. Though not a Linux-specific issue, I was working on a project for my in-laws last week that involved a hard disk upgrade. The disk cloning software that was included with the new hd installed EZBios without so much as asking me first, and I'm kind of upset about it :/.
Hi Jon You can remove it as suggested, but keep in mind some (older) machines may not support the large drive. I think the ezbios thingy simply tricks the machine to think its a smaller size IM sure you'll figgure it out
Actually, EZBios and company *replace* part of the BIOS. With the original design of the PC BIOS and how it interacted with the IDE specification, there was an effective limit of 512M on the usable size of a hard drive. These replacements basically provided an early version of LBA. They are quite unnecessary for all P2 and above (including AMD K6), I think all Pentiums, including AMD K5 (OverDrive chips on 486 boards count as 486es), and some 486-based systems. If the BIOS gives you the option of going with LBA, then you are good for drives up to at least 8 gig (there's another interaction that draws a line there for some systems). But... for Linux, an old BIOS is NOT a problem if you take one simple precaution. Linux, once it is booted, ignores the BIOS anyway. So the only problem is to make sure that it can boot through the BIOS. And to achieve that, simply accept the BIOS's determination of what your drive looks like, and carve a small partition (I'm currently using 8 meg, but five is enough) out of the first 1,023 cylinders. When defining how Linux will mount partitions, name this small partition /boot And install LILO either there, or (preferably) in the MBR. I follow this practice routinely, even on the machine that I built a year ago with all-new components. (But then, the old box I am using for a firewall actually requires it; and the box I intend to use for a print/DHCP/etc server, so that those services aren't on the firewall, probably does too.) -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/