A 500 GB HD requires 48 bit addressing.
Linux has no problem with that - the problem might be in the BIOS. I've got a RAID1 of two 500Gb drives in a fairly ancient machine with a 633MHz Celeron, no problems whatsoever. If you need to boot from it, just make sure the first few cylinders are accessible by the BIOS. (configure the HDD to be smaller than it really is). I have quite a few older machines running with newer 40Gb drives, which are configured as having just 1024 cylinders. Boots up fine, then Linux takes over.
I can second that. A while back I set up a 386 (with a 387 math coprocessor) with Linux (long story, mostly it was an experiment to see if I could do it.. I even had it booting to KDE... about 30 minutes after powering on), and dropped a 180GB drive on it, and it worked perfectly fine (set up the same as Per described) What people often don't realize is that they associate the computer ability to "find" hard drives with the broken way Microsoft accesses the drives. Microsoft has chosen to use the BIOS layer as an intermediary between the OS and the hardware. The result is you get into the stupidity of large drives not working with Windows... and on older hardware are stuck with flashing the BIOS if there is a patch available, or running special software that runs before Windows boots up. Linux on the other hand is not so stupid and is not limited by the BIOS when it accesses the drives. The result is that you can drop large drives into old hardware that does not recognize the drive size and it'll work perfectly fine (Note: I've over simplified here.. but you get the idea I hope) C -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org