Greets

I recently built and compiled a fresh firewall/nat/sambaserver out of
a p3 500 dell optiplex gx1.
Everything went smoothly two hard drives a. 10gb b.120gb
hda for the os and hdb for the file share.

Heres the weird issue.

If I go into the bios on boot up the 120gb hd shows up as max 65gb.

I tried updating the bios and still no change.

My question is as follows

Since slackware sees the whole 120gb partition the rest of the os is
working fine, should I worry ?

is it ok to leave is as such, thus far I have had no problems running it
as a test machine.


-thanks

In newsan.2003.11.07.00.58.20.508371@leader.deshade .com,
deshade <turath@leader.deshade.com> rambled:

>
> Since slackware sees the whole 120gb partition the rest of the os is
> working fine, should I worry ?
>
> is it ok to leave is as such, thus far I have had no problems running
> it as a test machine.
>

If it's not broken why try to fix it ?

--
Billy

"Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
I think so, Brain *NARF*, but don't camels spit a lot?

deshade <turath@leader.deshade.com> wrote:
> Greets

> I recently built and compiled a fresh firewall/nat/sambaserver out of
> a p3 500 dell optiplex gx1.
> Everything went smoothly two hard drives a. 10gb b.120gb
> hda for the os and hdb for the file share.

> Heres the weird issue.

> If I go into the bios on boot up the 120gb hd shows up as max 65gb.

> I tried updating the bios and still no change.

> My question is as follows

> Since slackware sees the whole 120gb partition the rest of the os is
> working fine, should I worry ?

> is it ok to leave is as such, thus far I have had no problems running it
> as a test machine.

Seems BIOS is detecting the wrong geometry. Happens often with older
BIOSes that assumed "hard drive will never get larger than x", then a
couple years later they do. A BIOS update will only help if that
assumption has been corrected in the update (which it appears it hasn't in
your case). You might try searching Dell's support site for something like
"65GB bios" and see if that turns up a BIOS version that has been
corrected if it bothers you that much.

But really, it's not a big deal. fdisk should ignore the BIOS and derive
the correct geometry on its own. BIOS doesn't have to be correct for the
Linux partitioning utilities to use the whole drive (unlike certain other
OSes that shall remain unnamed).

deshade wrote:
> Greets
>
> I recently built and compiled a fresh firewall/nat/sambaserver out of
> a p3 500 dell optiplex gx1.
> Everything went smoothly two hard drives a. 10gb b.120gb
> hda for the os and hdb for the file share.
>
> Heres the weird issue.
>
> If I go into the bios on boot up the 120gb hd shows up as max 65gb.
>
> I tried updating the bios and still no change.
>
> My question is as follows
>
> Since slackware sees the whole 120gb partition the rest of the os is
> working fine, should I worry ?
>
> is it ok to leave is as such, thus far I have had no problems running it
> as a test machine.
>
>
> -thanks
>
Hi!
No big issue. It would be if this drive had to be booted for some reason
from BIOS past this limit. As it is storage space only if the OS sees
the whole container, who needs what BIOS thinks.
This IS Linux and we need BIOS'es for the first 512 bytes of MBR no more.

Quote: "What me worry." (Alfred E. Neuman aka. MAD)

Have fun.

Stanislaw
Slack user from Ulladulla.

Billy Watt wrote:

> In newsan.2003.11.07.00.58.20.508371@leader.deshade .com,
> deshade <turath@leader.deshade.com> rambled:
>
>>
>> Since slackware sees the whole 120gb partition the rest of the os is
>> working fine, should I worry ?
>>
>> is it ok to leave is as such, thus far I have had no problems running
>> it as a test machine.
>>
>
> If it's not broken why try to fix it ?
>
You won't have problems running Slackware Linux, but you must be careful
with the position in disk of your kernel file. LILO uses the BIOS services
to load it from the HD, and if it's located beyond the 65MB that your BIOS
sees you won't be able to boot it.

On Fri,
07 Nov 2003 20:04:54 +0100, dieymir wrote:

> Billy Watt wrote:
>
>> In newsan.2003.11.07.00.58.20.508371@leader.deshade .com,
>> deshade <turath@leader.deshade.com> rambled:
>>
>>>
>>> Since slackware sees the whole 120gb partition the rest of the os is
>>> working fine, should I worry ?
>>>
>>> is it ok to leave is as such, thus far I have had no problems running
>>> it as a test machine.
>>>
>>
>> If it's not broken why try to fix it ?
>>
> You won't have problems running Slackware Linux, but you must be careful
> with the position in disk of your kernel file. LILO uses the BIOS services
> to load it from the HD, and if it's located beyond the 65MB that your BIOS
> sees you won't be able to boot it.

Greets

I am not having any problems with bootup. It boots up perfectly and even
mounts the 120 gb as /mnt/share dev/hdb.
I was just wanted to know if the bios only sees 65 gb and slack sees and
uses the whole disk would I have any problems. It runs fine so far.