Big disk in old bios

[Russell McOrmond]

   I was trying to install 8.04LTS on a friends machine today.  He 
already had Windows XP, so we bought a new disk which we installed to 
become the Linux disk.  It is a 7-year old machine, and the disk we got 
was a 200G disk.

   We ran into the problem where the BIOS didn't recognize this large 
disk.  I've seen this before -- I have other machines with 160G disks in 
them which the BIOS believes are 130G disks.  After I tried installing 
anyway, I got the famous "Grub loading, please wait ... Error 18" 
message.  I ended up needing to boot FreeDOS and do an 'fdisk /mbr' to 
get rid of GRUB just to leave the machine such that it could boot XP again.


   I notice that the default Ubuntu install was to set up a small SWAP 
space and a / which filled the rest of the disk.  I've seen this problem 
before, and the solution (which is actually the default for Fedora) is 
to make a small /boot partition at the beginning of the disk such that 
everything the boot loader needs is always accessible by the BIOS.

   I'm curious why Ubuntu doesn't do this?  I'm having to go back and 
try installing again at another date (after spending far too long this 
afternoon), and I'm going to be doing a manual partitioning where I'll 
set up /boot properly.   I guess I expected Ubuntu to just handle this, 
as this is the type of partitioning issue which average desktop users 
might run into fairly often.

   Thoughts?

-- 
  Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
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