Topic: HDD issue

[Lethal1983]

Hi All
I just installed the most recent version to an old PII to a new 160g HDD. It all installed fine then it got to the point where it had to reboot which it did. Then as it boots up it can not detect my HDD. and get the message Disk Boot Failure, Insert system disk and press enter.

I have tried replacing the IDE ribbon cable (in case it might be damaged) that didnt work.

Does anyone else have any ideas? im not sure what else i can do. Or is it just  an old pc that has had its day?

Thanks in advance
Lee

[Confucius]

Older PC's were having limits with HD size. These limits were 2, 8 and 32 GB when I remember correctly. It wouldn't surprise me that your BIOS doesn't support the 160 as 1 partition. When you have an old (6 or 8 GB) harddisk laying around I would try that to find out if that really is the problem.

Harro

[Lethal1983]

What can i do if i dont have a small HDD? the reason i picked this HDD up was because the old drive that i had died.

[compdoc]

One thing you can do is try a PCI IDE card. They come with their own bios which is added at boot. I dont know which work with the new release of SME, but the Promise cards are often supported. Like the Ultra66 or Ultra100. There's tons of em on ebay starting at $3

Make sure the card you get supports 160 Gigs, since thats a large drive...

[barame]

Can you give more infomation about your mainboard model or bios version. may be you need to upgrade bios from factory web site and it will see the large hdd size. In my experience I have ASUS motherboard PII 500 Mhz. with my 160 GB. it can see hdd after i upgrade bios to the lastes version.

Barame

[boss_hog]

Hey barame
if I remember correctly (can't find my notes on this), linux is capable of working around the BIOS limitation. In the BIOS you may need to change the HDD detection to auto or set it to LBA. Sorry, if I find my exact notes I will post more.
I did run into this problem on an old test computer. Early in the install Linux recognizes the incorrect drive geometry and should ask if you want to ignore it. Say yes and the install should still work.
Good luck
Joe

[boss_hog]

Howdy,
here are a few links with some helpful info:

http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-11.html

http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/2/16/28

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO

HTH
Joe