how to avoid BIOS during boot?

harddrivecleaner_at_yahoo.com
Date: 09/30/05 

Date: 29 Sep 2005 15:04:21 -0700

Hi all,

I put a new hard drive in an old laptop
and the BIOS seems to be only partially
aware of it, such that I cannot boot Linux.

The BIOS is aware of it when I run a
BIOS hard drive test (it's a Thinkpad
and it has built-in diagnostic programs),
but two things go wrong:

1. oddly enough LILO and GRUB cannot see the drive.
   I get "L 01 01.." error under LILO and
   GRUB gives error 17.

2. MSDOS doesn't know it's there even though
MSDOS's fdisk does.

My goal is to be able to boot Linux.
Is there a way to bypass the BIOS
for identifying and getting the
geometry for a drive?

I did notice that there is a "nuni" boot
loader that claims to bypass the BIOS,
but its tarball is not 100% open source,
if you look closely at it. Something's odd there.

Thanks.

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