These large drives came as the only hard drives in the machines,
and they had Windows 98 pre-installed. I presume that they were
correctly formatted for ~14 Gb under Win98, although I have
completely blown away any Microsoft products from these machines
and can't verify that. But presuming that is true, it would
seem that the BIOS should already be set to handle these large
drives, yet the install fdisk didn't manage to format them very
efficiently. If the BIOS is set correctly, should this happen
automatically? For that matter, whether I'm using the BIOS or
forcing C/H/S geometry, if large disk awareness doesn't happen
automatically, how do I do this *during* the install, since
Linux is going onto the large drive, the one and only
drive in the box? As I recall from the install, I get shuffled
off into fdisk before being able to specify anything special
about the drive.
Comments from experts would be appreciated. It seems that getting
the BIOS to recognize large drives is the way to go, but I'm not
sure what BIOS configuration I'm aiming for, and the HOWTO doesn't
cover this case. And how to do this during an install is a mystery
to me.
Thanks.
Stephen