[GLLUG] Laptop Hard Drive

[Charles Ulrich]

On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 19:44 -0400, Patrick Collora wrote:
> Hey Everyone,
> 
> My mother gave me her old Micron/Zeos Pentium laptop, which has an 800 
> MB drive.  I'd like to install one with a higher capacity, but I'm not 
> certain what it can support.  After searching the web I found that there 
> are a number of potential BIOS limitations, but I haven't found a way to 
> verify whether they are present or not other than to try a drive and see 
> what happens.  Unfortunately, the largest 2.5" drive I own is the 2 GB 
> one in my 486 notebook, which I'm sure this one can support as well.  Do 
> any of you have any extra laptop drives I could test in it?  Barriers 
> around 4 and 8 GB appear to be common, so I'd like to test one larger 
> than 8 GB.  I wouldn't mind putting some more RAM in it also, but 
> unfortunately the modules appear to be proprietary, so I may not be able 
> to find any.  I'll probably be able to come to the meeting tomorrow, for 
> a little while at least.
> 
> Thanks.

If you're going to run Linux on it, BIOS disk size limitations don't
matter. If you attach a 500GB drive to a BIOS that only supports a
maximum of 8GB, the BIOS will only see an 8GB drive. But Linux will see
the whole thing because it doesn't access the drive through the BIOS.
The only real limitation is that you can't boot off any partitions
higher than the 8GB boundary. Which is fine because most boot partitions
are written to the front of the disk.

-- 
Charles Ulrich
Ideal Solution, LLC - http://www.idealso.com