Re: upgrading 5 GB HD on Gateway Solo 1100

On Wednesday 09 July 2008 22:08, someone who identifies as *Vwaju* wrote
in /comp.os.linux.hardware:/

I have a 5 GB hard drive on my Gateway Solo 1100 laptop. I would like
to upgrade the hard drive and install Debian Linux.

I have been warned by several knowledgeable people that the problem
with upgrading the HD on Solo 1100 is that I may need a BIOS update to
address more than 32GB (and the BIOS update is "probably not
available").

There used to be a problem with old BIOS versions and large drives, in that
those BIOS versions could not access all of the drive's capacity. However,
if the processor in your machine is at least an Intel Pentium III,
equivalent - such as AMD's Athlon or Intel's Celeron - or newer, then
you're most likely fine without a BIOS flash.

For my present purposes, I would be quite happy with a 20GB HD, but
the smallest that Gateway will sell me is an 80GB Western Digital
Scorpio.

I'm actually surprised that an 80 GB disk is still being sold, now that
we've entered the era of 500 GB to 1 TB disks. ;-)

The Gateway tech insists that the BIOS does not require an upgrade to
address the bigger drive, although I may have to "partition
the drive". (I'm not sure what means, since the partitioning of the
drive is, I think, handled by the Debian installation program.)

I've never installed Debian myself, and it is possible that the partitioning
is automatically handled by the installer, but either way it is always best
to partition the drive yourself and assign mountpoints and filesystem space
per your own demands.

However, most helpdesk guys have only Windows in mind, and Windows tends to
want to consume the entire diskspace for itself, so maybe Windows has a
problem with such large partitions, which could then be remedied by
creating several separate partitions instead. (I don't know, I don't use
Windows. :-))

Should I believe Gateway?

Well, they've got the data on that machine since they built it, and so they
are best placed to tell you whether you need a BIOS flash or not. In
addition, if anything goes wrong, then it's their responsibility, because
it was one of their tech staff who told you what to do and you were
following his instructions.

--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)
.

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