Bios used to have limits on what they talked to for boot purposes. Offhand, I think on threshold was 8gb. Drives either had special hardware compatibility modes via jumper or real mode bios routines to get around that. <div class="gmail_quote">On Mar 7, 2012 10:22 PM, "Chick Tower" <<a href="mailto:c.e.tower@gmail.com">c.e.tower@gmail.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I have an old IBM Thinkpad T20. It's a 650MHz PIII with 256MB of RAM. It was built in Mexico, probably in July of 2000. The CMOS battery is dead, so when it starts I enter the BIOS and put in the correct time and date. The hard drive originally had Win95 or Win98 on it, but I replaced it with Linux and it works fine. It only has a 6GB hard drive, so I replaced it with a larger hard drive that currently has FreeBSD 7.2 installed on it. When I boot the Thinkpad with the new hard drive, I can still select to enter the BIOS, and it says it's loading the BIOS configuration utility, but it never brings up the screen. Well, it doesn't within ten minutes, which is at least ten times longer than it usually takes. I don't get an error message of any kind, just the normal "loading BIOS configuration" message. When I replace the original drive it boots as it did before. Without going to any trouble to look for an answer, does anyone know if IBM Thinkpads ever used to store part of the BIOS or the utility to modify it on the hard drive? -- Chick _______________________________________________ linux-user mailing list <a href="mailto:linux-user@egr.msu.edu" target="_blank">linux-user@egr.msu.edu</a> <a href="http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user" target="_blank">http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user</a> </blockquote></div>