Old BIOS and new harddrive

From: Guilllaume Filion (gfilion_at_gmail.com)
Date: 04/29/05 

Date: 28 Apr 2005 15:33:23 -0700

Hi all,

I'm trying to upgrade an old Pentium II with a 80 GB hard drive, but
the BIOS is not detecting the hard drive, and refusing to boot on it.
I read a lot of messages/articles about this and I must say that I'm a
bit confused, so hopefully you'll be able to clear things up.

Here are the facts:
The BIOS is dating from 1995.

When booting in Linux (on another PC), dmesg detects the hard drive
as:
hda: WDC WD800JB-00JJA0, ATA DISK drive
hda: 156301488 sectors (80026 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=155061/16/63,
UDMA(100)

I partitionned the drive like this:
hda1: 256 MB - swap
hda2: 79770 - linux /

lilo is set on the MBR.

The BIOS doesn't detect the drive -- it reports "none".

I tried putting various CHS values directly in the BIOS but without
success. It's not possible to write 155061 cylinders since there's
only place for 5 digits in the field.

Any idea about what to do? I hope I gave enough infos about the
problem.

Thanks in advance,
GFK's

Relevant Pages

  • Re: 2 wondows versions detected on pc startup?
    ... if not put there by the BIOS? ... BIOS examines the very first sector of the disk for a Master Boot Record ... table which describes the layout of the fixed disk and the partition loader ... This is where Windows and NTLDR comes in, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment)
  • Re: maximum hard drive size in Latitude cpi
    ... > actually written a boot loader they won't be so adamant about how "Windows ... > of the disk, and while it is being read off of the disk the machine is ... > limitatoins of that BIOS. ... After that the kernel takes over. ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: Fn-F2 on dell 1505 under debian 4.0 etch
    ... now you can change bios, cmos setting of your dell laptop from ... some tokens are here:http://linux.dell.com/libsmbios/main/token.html ... "Enables the systemâ??s built-in parallel port to operate in AT mode ... 0x0051 Boot_Diskette_First "For the next system boot, ...
    (comp.sys.laptops)
  • Re: [DOCUMENT] Re: Intel Macs that boot FreeBSD?
    ... on how closely coupled the FreeBSD/i386 boot process is to the BIOS ... Reads and relocates boot2 to low memory to continue boot process ... 40:49h Video Mode ...
    (freebsd-current)
  • Re: Major Boot/IDE issues. Help Please!!!!
    ... Boot to bios. ... Primary Master: STA80216 ... Past the IDE detection and DMI pool, I get this message - Disk failure, unable to boot. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)