Matt:

> My Red Hat installation has finally outgrown the partition it lives 
> on, so as I type this the good folks at UPS are delivering to me a 
> new 8.4 gig drive (the biggest thing my creaky old motherboard can 
> handle) which will be devoted entirely to Linux.

I don't have answers for you for your Debian questions, but I will say
that you can have as large a hard disk drive as you like.  The only
limitation on hard drive sizes is imposed by the BIOS, for booting purposes,
or by stupid operating systems that use the BIOS for hard disk drive
accesses.

As it says in the Linux kernel source code, "We don't need no steenking
BIOS."

To get the system booted, you can use a small boot partition on the
large hard drive, a floppy disk, CD-ROM, network card boot ROM, or whatever
you want.

Once the Linux kernel is booted, you have access to the entire size of
the hard drive, since the kernel talks directly to the IDE controller and
does not use the BIOS to find out what the drive geometry is.

The only time I've had trouble with this was an older version of "fdisk"
which did not support the large number of cylinders I had on a 35GB drive
which I installed in a Pentium 60, which dated from 1995 or so.  I was
able to get the drive partitioned using a newer version of fdisk.

Once the drive was partitioned everything else worked as expected, and I
was able to use the entire size of the drive.

Thanks for your presentation on GNU GPL last night, I found it instruc-
tive.  For some reason I've never read the GPL myself, I suppose I ought
to.

--
Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net)                     Ask me about Linux!
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/

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