I Need some info on harddrives

[alan c]

mike wrote:
> Hi, I know this is a little off topic, but maybe someone out there can give me some ideas.    Ubuntu and Orca helped me out again today, but I have never ran into this before.
> A friend had a new dell computer with windows vista. He wants to use windows xp instead. The problem I ran into was that when the windows xp disk boots, it says it can't find a hard drive in the computer. The drive is a 320 gb drive.
> So, I booted intrepid, and it finds the drive with no problems. Using Orca and cfdisk I had no problems removing the partitions. But windows xp still says it can't find a hard drive.
> Maybe I can convince him to use ubuntu instead. But has anyone else ever ran into this before? I even tried partitioning the drive using ubuntu in to small partitions, because I have heard there is a limit on the size drive windows xp will see. But that didn't work either. This brings up another thing. Is there a limit on the size hard drive ubuntu can see?
> Mike.

What comes to mind is something to do with the bios.
Examine th ebios setup screens to verify th ebios can see and 
recognise the HD?
If it is a bios (an old machine?? but this is a new machine!) where 
the bios can only recognise HDs of up to a certain size, then even if 
you installed ubuntu it could not boot from the HD because the bios - 
which kicks things off initially, could not see the HD  containing the 
booting partition.

I have had this type of prob with older machines  so I retained the 
old 10GB HD for booting - only a small  booting  partition is needed - 
and used a 320GB HD for the rest of the installation including the 
system partition/s.

I am not sure if this could be to do with the problem you see though.
hth
good luck

-- 
alan cocks
Kubuntu user#10391
Linux user #360648