160 gb drive in old system

[Tom Metro]

Rusty Shackleford wrote:
> For future reference when did computers stop having the problem with
> drives over 137 gb or is that pretty much a microsoft thing?

Large Disk HOWTO: History of BIOS and IDE limits
http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html


The underlying cause is running out of bits in the ATA addressing. As 
the specification was updated to handle more bits, you could have 
problems with the computer's BIOS and/or ATA drivers not being up to 
date. Whether the BIOS was up to date had a varying impact, depending on 
whether the OS bootloader depended on the BIOS. Thus sometimes having a 
new enough ATA driver was all you needed, if your kernel (Windows or 
Linux) was below the threshold (137 GB...before that 8 GB) or your 
bootloader didn't use the BIOS. (On several occasions when upgrading 
Windows systems to larger disks, I've had to split the drive into two 
partitions, with an OS partition below the capacity threshold. On Linux, 
I use a /boot partition, so it has never been an issue.)

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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