I bought a new 60GB hard drive for my aging 266Mhz and ended up copying all the windows stuff over to the new drive and partitioning it for SuSE 8.0 installation. I updated my BIOS as far as Intel will let me, but Maxtor still added EZBIOS to the boot process when I formatted the new drive. As I recall, the restriction is on hard drives greater than something like 8.4GB. When I did my partitioning for SuSE installation, I just chose a windows partition at the beginning that was less than 8GB and let SuSE have the other 52+GB. I have no problem booting up with LILO now to either windows or SuSE and I don't see the EZ BIOS popping up anymore. I can't really say for sure what I did that makes this all work OK. Mine will boot from CD, so I can't address that part of your question. I would check with the website of your motherboard manufacturer to get the latest BIOS upgrade. If you've never upgraded a BIOS it can be a little scary as they keep telling you at each step that you could lose everything if you screw up, but just back up everything important first and make sure you have printed out clear instructions. If your current BIOS is limited to 2GB HDs, then I'd be willing to bet there is an upgrade to that BIOS available somewhere. Try Google with the name of your motherboard and BIOS upgrade, and I bet you find it. Good luck, sorry I'm not an uber-hacker and cannot tell you exactly how to fix this. Yours, Brian. I proudly use SuSE Gnu/Linux 8.0 Professional. Kernel version 2.4.18-4GB Current Linux uptime: 8 days 16 hours 02 minutes. Doug McGarrett wrote:
Has anyone installed with Western Digital EZ BIOS, which is intended to make old PC's able to work with large hard drives? We have been able to put new Pentiums (at 233MHz) into old M/B's, and large HD's into the same machines, but the on-board BIOS is limited to 2 GB hd's. There is a routine that writes to the HD, called "EZ BIOS" that makes the machine read great big hard disks. It seems to exist via some kind of BIOS loader and/or fs loader. These are elderly work machines, and we'd like to put Linux on them to play with. They will not be networked. I don't understand this stuff much, so I need to ask what I should do next. (I would like to get Linux running so I could use the C compiler to learn the language. It would be ideal for lunchtime learning.)
What should I do to make this machine compatible with Linux, while keeping MS Win98_SE? Or what must I do to install and boot SuSE 8.0 on this machine. (BTW: the replacement BIOS does not support booting from CD.)
I have looked thru the book that SuSe provided, but I don't see any ways in it to deal with old BIOS's and new drives, and software drive corrections. Please advise.
Thanx. --doug