Big disk in old bios

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 16 May 2008, Russell McOrmond wrote:

>   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.

Hi Russell.  I think this is a problem that people used to run in to often 
but don't anymore.  I always manually partition and many years ago I 
typically did a small /boot to avoid the "1024 cyl" issue and other 
fun[1].

Today, if a machine is so old that I see a problems like this then it has 
probably developed age related complaints or has arbitrary limits (like 
the one you mention) that are going to soak up time as an astounding rate. 
Debugging age-related h/w problems simply isn't worth it - it is cheaper 
to acquire new and reliable h/w.  You're already set for your 2nd visit, 
right? :)

Before anyone thinks I don't care about hardware waste - I care a lot.
I'm hugely into virtualisation and thin client technologies partly as a 
way of reducing h/w waste (there are lots of other advantages too).

A second point I want to make is that desktop Ubuntu is not known for 
considering older h/w.  I have built a few Ubuntu systems with <256MB ram 
in recent years and I've had to use the server or alternate cdroms :)

[1] I still typically build a small root filesystem but for unrelated 
reasons.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine..."
 	-- RFC 1925 "The Twelve Networking Truths"