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Perhaps someone reading the list has resolved this already, Recently I inherited ten working DELL 486/MEs with: 66 MHz, 325MB hard drives, and 32 MB RAM. Eventually I plan to use them to build a Beowulf system. I installed a 6.0 GB hard drive on one of them with SuSE Linux 6.0, it works fine and is now my primary Linux box. I partially installed Red Hat Linux 6.0 on another 486. The installation was incomplete needing 770 MB or so. I decided to upgrade with a 8.4 GB drive, and had to upgrade the Phoenix Ltd. BIOS. The BIOS can)B?t see the 8.4 GB hard drive. I bought a "DTC Ultima EIDE port and BIOS upgrade card" (for older computers if BIOS does not support HDD greater than 500 MB) and plugged it into an ATI slot. I couldn)B?t partition "/dev/had", only starting at "/dev/hdc". The new BIOS more or less recognizes the large ATA drive and reports this, but the machine defaults to the Phoenix Ltd. BIOS. It advises checking the jumpers, I tried, switching the drive from Master (default) to Slave, with the same results, can)B?t access it. I installed Red Hat 6.0 on this machine and it worked fine, except I was unable to access "/dev/had", or "LILO" , so I had to boot Linux from a floppy. I read in "Linux secrets" Linux cannot be installed via a secondary BIOS. My question is: Has anyone successfully installed Linux after upgrading the BIOS on a 486? Short of going ahead and replacing the motherboard, this might be an exercise in futility, but I)B?m not convinced yet. Thanks in advance for any information, - Leslie Everett - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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