Big disk in old bios

[Brian Burger]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 11:13 PM, Robert Brockway
<robert at timetraveller.org> wrote:
> Today, if a machine is so old that I see a problems like this then it has
> probably developed age related complaints

A machine doesn't have to be that old or much out of date to have this
BIOS limit w/ larger hard drives. I wouldn't consider a three-year-old
machine unusably geretaric, but it's quite likely to have this one
issue with HDDs over 120GB. (my own desktop is about this old, does
SATA and everything I need, and when I recently installed a 500GB HDD
I did a /boot partition automatically - I assume it needs it, but
didn't bother wasting an installation cycle to check...)

> 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 :)

That's an issue with any LiveCD, though. They run the whole OS in ram,
but you really do need enough of it...

It would be nice if at least the alternate install suggested a /boot
partition by default, though. Time to file a bug?

Brian
ubuntu.ca