Finding BIOS Upgrades?

CrazyDwarf asks: "I dug up and old system that my company was about to toss in the dumpster and decided to load Linux on it. My problem: the BIOS will not recognize more than 500 MB of the HDD. I don't have a CD-ROM for this PC. I was looking for a BIOS upgrade download, but AWARD wants me to buy it from some third party. If I could afford to buy it from them, I wouldn't be doing all this, I'd just get a CD-Rom and move on. Where are some good places for me to go find a free (no cost) download to upgrade my BIOS? I have been searching for an hour on Google and have not really found anything."

Comments

How old?

[Jester998]

Hmm... depending on how old the system actually is, it might not even HAVE downloadable BIOS updates. IIRC, most 486 systems and even some 586-based systems didn't have Flash ROMs... to upgrade the BIOS, you had to physically replace the BIOS CMOS.

If the motherboard does, indeed, have a flashable BIOS, then try looking up the part/model number on either the manufacturer's site or Google.

- Jester

Re:How old?

[Pogue Mahone]

The old MoBos used to have socketed EPROMS for the BIOS - quite easy to replace, as long as you have a programmer. But buy a new device, so that if all goes pear-shaped you can plug the old one back in. Anyway, you don't need your BIOS to recognise more than 500MB. Simply make a small partition (10MB should be enough) at the start of the disk, and put your kernel etc. there. Mount it as /boot. That should work with most good distros. Apart from boot time, a Linux system doesn't need the BIOS. The only exception to this BIOS problem that I know of is with some old caching disk controllers. I have one that has a 2048-cylinder hard limit in the controller, which limits the disk size to about 1 GB. But that was in an absolutely ancient (ca. 10 years old) 486i - all ISA.

Re:How old?

[bob_dinosaur]

I believe you may be recalling wrongly. I never came across a 486 that didn't have a flashable BIOS.

Re:How old?

[SN74S181]

Sometimes a BIOS won't boot off an IDE drive unless the entire drive is below a certain size. That's what older drives are kept around for. I used to keep old 40MB IDE drives (the smallest in the WD Caviar series) around for use as the first drive in a Linux machine. It's an excellent use for old hoary stuff like that to make it your boot partition.

Re:How old?

[Dave9876]

Every 486 I've come across has had a chunky EPROM dip (some might have had EEPROM).

There is an workaround

[ljaguar]

Boot from floppy.

Your problem is that you can't _boot_ from a HD larger than 500MB -- because as soon as Linux kernel is loaded, BIOS isn't needed any more anyways. All you need to to is load the kernel somehow and all the limitations of BIOS doesn't exist anymore.

Then whatever you've got connected to IDE (zip, cdrom, any HD) will work because Linux kernel is up-to-date with things.

To repeat myself, after Linux kernel is loaded, the kernel takes over. BIOS simply isn't consulted again.

Of course, some other OS's like DOS still accesses disk through BIOS, so DOS wouldn't work.

Re:There is an workaround

[polymath69]

Your problem is that you can't _boot_ from a HD larger than 500MB -- because as soon as Linux kernel is loaded, BIOS isn't needed any more anyways.

Wouldn't it also work to simply put a /boot partition in the first several cylinders of the disk? I think, then, that no floppies would be needed.

Re:There is an workaround

[ninewands]

Wouldn't it also work to simply put a /boot partition in the first several cylinders of the disk? I think, then, that no floppies would be needed.

You are correct sir ...

It is my understanding that a separate /boot partition will force the kernel down into the part of the disk that the ROM-BIOS can handle. The first 10 MB should give room for multiple kernels, etc.

Once the kernel is loaded, the IDE drivers will handle the disk at the hardware level and BIOS limitations become moot.

I've never had to fight with the 500 MB limit, but the kernel handily defeated the 2 GB limit of my old P166-MMX mobo ...

Re:There is an workaround

[ljaguar]

It is my understanding that a separate /boot partition will force the kernel down into the part of the disk that the ROM-BIOS can handle. The first 10 MB should give room for multiple kernels, etc.

It is my understanding that you are wrong.

The problem at hand is that the BIOS cannot be configured to correctly acknowledge the drive in the first place.

If your solution held, we could have >500MB HD work in DOS by keeping the size of the partitions below 500MB. (Because it would boot off the first partition fine.) But it doesn't work like that. We are not looking at the size of _partition_, but the size of the _hard drive_. As in BIOS cannot even get to master boot record.

What you are referring to is how far in the drive the boot records can read. You are thinking of LILO and stuff.

The limit was that the BIOS could read till so many cylinders to load the real OS. Thus LILO (in the boot record) could not read past 512 cylinders (not sure about the exact number). It can be solved by using some kind of lba option in lilo.conf. (by using the logical block address instead of CHS)

Re:There is an workaround

[mclearn]

I thought that this is what the user-mode (mode 42? 43?) was for. So long as you could put in the correct (or compatible) CHS values, the BIOS would happily churn away, even if the values did not address the entire disk.

Re:There is an workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

See, then it wouldn't really be a BIOS limitation would it? Or a minor one at best.

Nope, life isn't that nice to ya. Sorry, pal.

Re:There is an workaround

[KewlPC]

The limit with many BIOSes is that they stored the cylinder as a 10-bit number, which means they could only load up to the first 1024 (0 - 1023) cylinders.

But as long as the kernel was below the first 1024 cylinders (by making a /boot partition, and making it the first partition on the disk (not necessarily first in the partition table, but at the first physical location on the HD) and then making your other partitions come after it, you can circumvent the problem).

And the disk size limitations of DOS were a combinations of the limitations of FAT16 and the BIOS.

If the BIOS isn't even acknowledging the HD's presense, then:
1)The jumper settings aren't configured properly on the HD (master, slave, cable select, etc.)
2)The disk is FUBAR
3)The BIOS settings are wrong
4)The BIOS's IDE autodetection can't deal with the disk for whatever reason

Check to see if other HDs (preferrably of similar size and on the same IDE controller on the same priority (master or slave)) work or not. And remember to make sure the jumpers are set correctly and try manually entering the values for your HD.

Re:There is an workaround

[MrResistor]

It is my understanding that you are the one who is wrong, because you are proscribing to Linux the limitations of DOS.

DOS uses the BIOS for disk access during normal operation, hence the limitations you describe. Linux uses the BIOS only to load /boot, which should be easily accessable by the BIOS as long as it is a small primary partition in the first cylinders of the drive.

The hard part will be setting the partitions, which may have to be done on a motherboard that doesn't suffer those limitations.

Re:There is an workaround

[ljaguar]

Sigh.
No, I'm doing nothing of the sort.

You can't access the primary partition, because you cannot even access the disk. You cannot access the disk, because the BIOS won't work correctly with the disk because, well, that's why it's called a BIOS limitation.

And the correct wording would be: lilo uses the BIOS only to load the kernel (you don't _load_ "/boot." wtf does that mean anyways?), which should be easily accessable by the BIOS as long as it is a small primary partition in the first cylinders of the drive. Remember, it's lilo that loads the kernel, and it's lilo which is under the limitation of BIOS. and BIOS can't get to lilo. I sound like a parrot. Why do I have to repeat myself?

Re:There is an workaround

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldnt you just use a small hard drive to boot from that your motherboard will recognize and when the kernel is loaded it will recognize the second larger hard drive.

There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay

[hackwrench]

for hard drives that replaces the bios.

Relevant Search

Re:There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay

[ninewands]

This sounds like something like Western Digital's "EZ-Bios" ... which even WD's Tech Support recommends that people NOT use unless there is NO other choice.

Since it is possible to finesse the BIOS limitation with a small /dev/hda1 of say, 10 MB, EZ-Bios and its equivalents sound like A Very Bad Idea(TM).

Re:There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay

[PD]

I used EZ-Disk (I think that's the actual name) and it worked just fine. The Lilo manual said that it was compatible, and my computer was having a lot of trouble seeing the 11.5 gig disk.

That was a while ago though, I don't know how it would work with a larger disk.

Re:There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay

[ljaguar]

Unless you have a BIOS limitation on your hands, it is not at all recommended that you use EZ-BIOS (which is the correct name).

I have bunch of horrible experiences with it, which unbelievably enough, I can't remember fully.

Numero Uno biggy is if you _ever_ boot from floppy (from motherboard BIOS). If you boot from floppy, you are _bypassing_ the ez-bios loader, and the disk becomes unusable.

Hmm, actually, I believe EZ-BIOS gives you an option to boot from floppy _after_ it loads itself, but you are still out of luck if you try to boot from CD (or zip, or scsi, or any other boot option from the motherboard).

Like I said, I can't remember all the bad things with it; my mind must be blocking out the traumatic events or something. :-P

It's actually pretty transparent and It Just Works (tm) for the most of the times. I remember using it because I simply didn't know what it was in the beginning. But when I tried to mangle drives and switch OS's and other stuff like that, it was damn hard to get by.

Re:There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay

[PD]

OK, we were both wrong. It's EZ-Drive

I found the large disk howto, and it says:

Linux does support OnTrack Disk Manager since version 1.3.14, and EZ-
Drive since version 1.3.29. Some more details are given below.

And then below, it says:

5. Kernel disk translation for IDE disks

If the Linux kernel detects the presence of some disk manager on an
IDE disk, it will try to remap the disk in the same way this disk
manager would have done, so that Linux sees the same disk partitioning
as for example DOS with OnTrack or EZ-Drive. However, NO remapping is
done when a geometry was specified on the command line - so a
`hd=cyls,heads,secs' command line option might well kill compatibility
with a disk manager.

The remapping is done by trying 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 255 heads
(keeping H*C constant) until either C

What that means is that if you're using Linux, you probably don't need this thing. You just put your kernel in the first part of the disk that the BIOS can see and pass the parms to the kernel on the lilo boot line.

If you're dual booting with Windows, then you probably will need this EZ-Drive. And in that case, you do NOT want to specify the hd parameters to the kernel. The kernel knows about EZ-Drive and will do the right thing.

Re:There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay

[PD]

EZ-Drive has a configuration menu that you can operate.

You boot from the hard drive, then EZ-Drive loads, then EZ-Drive gives you a menu that you can use to boot off the floppy.

I don't know about booting from the CD-Rom, but you are almost certainly right about booting from a zip or scsi drive. EZ-Drive is not the best software, but Linux DOES know about it and will do the right thing when it sees it.

Re:There's a special boot loader, er disk overlay

[twilightzero]

Ok, first let me state that I WORK for WD tech support, hence I'm probably the most qualified person to answer this question, also there will be stuff in here that's my opinion and not the one of the company .

Now, having said that, let me address the issue of EZ-BIOS. I don't know where you heard that we don't reccommend it, but from what I've seen on other posts here a lot of people are basing the descriptions of it on OLD versions of our software (and therefore of EZ-BIOS). We haven't used OnTrack for our software for several years now. What we DO reccommend is not using EZ-BIOS on a system that doesn't need it...that makes sense, doesn't it? Linux with kernel version 2.2 or above (I believe, or is it 2.0? Anyway if you're still running 2.0 or below I would HIGHLY reccommend upgrading), Win2k or Win XP don't need BIOS support, so we tell people don't use it with those OS'es. In cases like that, we just have them set it up in the BIOS as type User, 1023 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors, and mode of Normal (or LBA Mode disabled). This sets the drive up as about 528 MB and allows the BIOS to boot to the drive, load up the kernel/ntldr, and continue on its merry way. Again, we do NOT reccommend EZ-BIOS for use on systems like this because it's not needed.

On the other hand, anybody with Win9x and a system with a BIOS limit (8.4 or 32 GB limit most often) are probably going to be best off using it. In the over 1 year I've been working here, I think we've had ONE single call with a computer where EZ-BIOS wouldn't work on the system. Now there are other circumstances where EZ-BIOS may have a conflict with another piece of software on the computer. Most software that writes to the boot track or tries to control the boot process is not going to work with it; common culprits include Roxio GoBack, System Commander, and Partition Magic (which writes its own info in the partition tables and basically makes the partitions unreadable by anything else).

Pretty old system

[MrResistor]

Old enough, by the sound of things, that running X would likely be painful. You should be able to squeeze a non-GUI install into 500M without too much difficulty. Check out TinyApps for so small distros.

Re:Pretty old system

[david duncan scott]

I don't think TinyApps is what you meant:

Virtually all of the programs listed here are free of charge and for use under Windows..."How about BeOS, *nix, Amiga, QNX, etc?", I am asked. Those who are comfortable using these operating systems need no such guide as this...

I did google up some tiny Linux directories here and here, and of course there's TomsRtBt.

Re:Pretty old system

[MrResistor]

You are correct. I remembered TinyApps having links to some Tiny Linux distros, but apparently I remembered wrong.

Thanks for the real links.

Re:Pretty old system

[Medieval_Thinker]

I was trying to find something to install on a 500M HD to salvage an old system. I had a Caldera 2.2 disk and a RH 5.1 disk in the archive. They both installed nicely and X worked about as snappily as Win 95 might have on the same system.

The install claimed that the Caldera needed 160M, and with that size HD, there weren't options for the install. The RH gave options, although I just took the default workstation. It needed about 325M.

The RH stayed, and it is working pretty well.

How I find old BIOS

[itwerx]

1 - Search Google for your complete mbd model# (in quotes if there's any dashes in it)
2 - Somewhere in the search results there will be a link or reference to an appropriate file.
3 - Try to download the file; if you can't then do another search using just that filename (in quotes again).

This has always worked for me.

(Aaack! I just replied to an "Ask Slashdot" and told them to use Google!
And here I swore I'd never reply to another troll...)

Re:How I find old BIOS

[(startx)]

either that, or if the manufacturer's site doesn't have any info on the board anymore, you can always use the Wayback machine. I've gotten a few old bioses that way.

Openbios might be tha ticket

[Cardhore]

OpenBIOS might work on your board.

OpenBIOS will be a free portable firmware implementation. The goal is to implement a 100% IEEE 1275-1994 (Referred to as Open Firmware) compliant firmware. Among it's features, Open Firmware provides an instruction set independent device interface. This can be used to boot the operating system from expansion cards without any native binary code. Thus it is OpenBIOS' goal to work on all common platforms, like x86, Alpha, x86-64 and IA-64. Additionally OpenBIOS targets the embedded systems sector, where a sane and unified firmware is a crucial design goal. Open Firmware is found on many servers and workstations and there are several commercial implementations from SUN, Apple, IBM, CodeGen and others. More information on OpenBIOS is available on the About OpenBIOS page

Re:Openbios might be tha ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

Will never happen. Too many "magic numbers" that BIOS manufacturers have and we don't to get this stuff operating properly Its a pipe dream, it will never happen. How about this, it won't ever happen because its a pipe dream. You can contract a certain few people to have Open-Firmware ported to your PC motherboard of choice (if the motherboard wasn't a PC it would have a BIOS in it, it would have SRM) - but it will cost you and no it wont be free. Now use that PC the way it was intended. CHEAP! FAST! Disposable. Cheapest, fastest, and short lived. FAST. Cheap. No SRM for you.

I've looked into a real ROM programs for PC. It wont ever happen its a pipe dream. Its a pipe dream it wont ever happen.

So, the day you think anyone will have an Alpha-SRM-like ROM for a PC, will be 10 years after that when it actually comes to fruition, by that time, PC arch will be deprecated and we can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.

Re:Openbios might be tha ticket

[MisterManiac]

On a similar note, LinuxBIOS is some sort of ubercompressed, stripped-down linux kernel with some hardware-specific instructions that replaces a conventional BIOS, and then can activate a second-level boot loader like LILO. I don't know motherboard models, so I'm not sure if the project is geared more toward servers. The list of supported motherboards is here.

Re:Openbios might be tha ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

FORGET IT.
Short list of working mainboards:
Intel L440GX+
Winfast 6300
Procomm BST1B
430TX-based mainboards
Gigabit GA-6BXC
SiS 730 (i.e. K7) chipset
VIA VT5292A
VIA VT5426
ASUS CUA ALI TNT2 (Acer M1631/M1535d chipset)
STPC series (thanks to Hamish Guthrie):
STPC Atlas
STPC Consumer-S
STPC Client
Untested, but should work:
STPC Consumer
STPC Industrial
STPC Consumer-II
STPC Elite
Status unknown (no recent reports): MS440GX, i810

NO recent or decent motherboards here.

Nothing to see here people. Nothing to see move along. If the motherboard vendors don't want to do it forget it ever happening okay. There is lots of magic numbers that get fed to the ASICs as they are given life through power... And those numbers are somebody's secret. Have fun poking around empirically to find the sweet spot while ruining your motherboards performance, voiding its warranty to do what? Use Linux to load Linux? Idiots.

Re:Openbios might be tha ticket

[sporktoast]

I'm sorry, sometimes it takes me a few tries to understand some things.

Are you saying that this is some sort of pipe dream or something?

Re:Openbios might be tha ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

We can forget about this because its a pipe dream and it wont ever happen and it wont ever happen because its a pipe dream.

I think its clear its a pipe dream, we can forget about it because its a pipedreamery factory pumping out pipes and dreams.

Re:Openbios might be tha ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

HUH? There is a BIOS with the old Capcom game Pipe Dream included?

Re:Openbios might be tha ticket

[Anonymous Coward]

Pipe dream was made by Bullet Proof.

Pipe Dream (US) - 1990 by Bullet-Proof Software/Lucasfilm

http://screenmania.retrogames.com/nes/01/nes_0023. html

Now about a fucking PC with OpenBIOS, SRM, or LinBIOS. It won't fucking happen because its a Pipe Dream; and its a Pipe Dream therefore, it won't fucking happen.

LICK MY PIPE! YOU FAGGORSANDS!

I HATE PC BIOS BUT MACS SUCK MY FUCKING COCK SO BAD and that OpenROM/OpenFirmware is arguably SHITTIER than a PC BIOS.

Fuck APPLE. BTW, the Dual G4 is getting SLAUGHTERED by a Single P4 2.5GHz. HAHAHAHA. They wont even publish SPEC/CPU2000 results HAHAHA.

Go here to see the Mac MYTH die, ZEALOT FAGS. http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/fea tures/cw_macvspc2.htm

So much for Computers with a "real man's BIOS." They are slow as fucking shit.

Just out of curiosity ...

[ninewands]

Why does it seem like this is the first "Ask Slashdot" in quite some time that actually falls under the rubric of "News for Nerds, Things that Matter"???

Re:Just out of curiosity ...

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps if he gave the model number of the mobo and the complete post string it would have been a nerdworthy post, but since he didn't it was just a waste of our time.

Re:Just out of curiosity ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that some loser is too cheap to buy a BIOS upgrade and would rather get a free one is a "thing that matters" how?

Two alternate solutions

[inkfox]

Firstly, you can just boot off a floppy. The BIOS doesn't need to understand the drive, so long as the kernel does.

Secondly, you can likely boot off the drive if you go into the BIOS configuration and manually specify the correct number of heads and cylinders/sectors and just fib about the number of tracks. If you boot Linux from a small boot partition at the start of the drive, you're likely just fine.

Re:Two alternate solutions

[inkfox]

That should have been - correct number of heads and sectors, and fib about the number of tracks/cylinders.

Maybe obvious. Just being anal.

Do what your company was doing.

[duffbeer703]

Chuck the thing in the dumpster.

The days of "I can run linux great on a 486" are long over. If you decide to run a desktop system with a recent version of KDE or GNOME, even a slow pentium 2 is brought to it's knees.

My advice to you would be to pick up a cheap PC from somewhere that is 733+ MHz... you should be able to find something for less that $200.

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[EllF]

Who says he planned on using KDE or GNOME? I'm running a 486 laptop without X installed, and it's blazingly fast - and very useful. I write papers on it with vim, print from it, connect to the net via links, check my email, and even play the occasional game of nethack.

A slightly beefier system sits to my left - a P75, running Ion, which uses very few system resources. It has X installed, and is quite nice for doing development work.

$200 is still a significant chunk of change - that's two months of food for me, or almost a month's rent, for example. A free system is not something to be turned up - you just don't install the bloatware that most people are clamoring for.

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, $200 can be quite a bit less than a days work.

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[foniksonik]

Where do you live that $200 is almost a month's rent?

that seems quite incredible in this inflated world we live in... I'm living at home with the family for a few months and I still pay more for my room.

When I was renting a single apartment it was more like $1200 a month. Yeah, I'm saving a lot so I can get in to the market when it hits bottom later this year.

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[EllF]

I live in Western Massachusetts, where I split a three bedroom apartment with two friends. My share of the rent (with the smallest room) is $250; the most expensive room (and obviously the largest) is $325. Bills come to about $250 a month (food, utilities, gas, aikido lessons, etc.). Throw another $100 a month in for sundry expenses.

I figure that $600 a month isn't bad for a student living on the cheap; diet is actually pretty easy (being a vegitarian), and when you're not spending a lot on food you have some extra cash to throw about.

I don't know a ton about the market - making money simply doesn't interest me. I'd rather go hiking. :)

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[cbcbcb]

I ran KDE 2.2.2 on a 486/66 with 24MB of RAM for a while, and it was OK for basic web browsing. It took a while to start up, but once up and running it was quite usable (in fact, more so than the crappy celery 400 system which it replaced - On-board video sucks)

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to run a GUI system on a slow PC, the way to go is probably QNX or Windows. Seriously.

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[MrResistor]

Where are you living that rent is so high?

I'm paying $625 for a spacious 2-bedroom appartment with a laundry room. Back when I did the roommate thing my rent was never over $300. $1200 would get me a 2- to 4-bedroom house, depending on location. I'm in California, so even that is a bit inflated compared to other parts of the country.

$1200 for a 1-bedroom sounds like Bay Area prices to me. You do know that most of the rest of the country is significantly cheaper, don't you?

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[nelsonal]

Why does everyone go directly to the city, and do not pass go. My rent is $350/mo. Yeah its in Montana, but I have a 10 minute drive to work, and I'm about a 5 minute walk to the woods. Its not the biggest place in town, but it meets my single needs just fine. I have a cool job, and enjoy life here quite a bit.

Re:Do what your company was doing.

[Geekboy(Wizard)]

wtf part of cali do you live in? central valley (manteca, modesto, stockton) rent was way higher than that. i live in the bay area, as i would gladly kill for only 1200 in rent! :P

MaxBlast, EZ-BIOS ...

[qurob]

When you buy a new hard drive, (retail packaged) you get a nice floppy with a program that allows your older BIOS's to see the big drive.

You could try Maxtor or Western Digitals web sites, they have them up for downloading in the support section.

If you aren't using a Maxtor or WD drive, try downloading an older version, or 'modify' it.

BIOS upgrades

[Anonymous Coward]

A listing of BIOS Upgrades for almost every board that supports upgrading can be found at http://www.wimsbios.com/

BIOS Upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Why upgrade it? The inherent problem is that the BIOS cannot access a bootable partition that lies in the >1024 cylinder range. Just make a small /boot partition that falls beneath the 1024 cylinder limit... the kernel resides there, and it will boot fine. Once the kernel is in memory, BIOS geometry shortcomings are irrelevant.

really really

[XO]

I wish we could moderate the actualy articles. I view with EVERYTHING on the front page.. so i hope this didn't actually show on the front page.. but from number of responses, i guess it did.

CmdrTaco/CowboyNeal: please give us the ability to moderate stories away from the front page.

This one just doesn't deserve to be there. We all know how to find BIOS updates, and we all know the answer to his problem.

The ultimate bios site

[mikelobby]

Be sure to try Wim' Bios page Click the award or ami bios id link at the top and you will be directed to a page the can identify the motherboard manifacturer based on the bios id (the string of numbers at the bottom of the screen during post). Armed with that knowledge, you can then go to that companies site and look for your particular board. It has helped me locate bios' for no-name boards many times. As an aside, I don't know much about Asian culture, but it seems to me they must know that some of their products are really crappy and thus don't put their company name anywhere on them. --Mike

Get a small disk, and put your boot loader on that

[mjtg]

I have an old 486 at home that has the same 500Mb restriction.

I put 2 disks into it - a 330Mb (with Windows 95), and a 2Gb (with Red Hat 6.2). LILO is installed on the 330Mb master. The BIOS finds LILO, then LILO loads Windows or Linux. Works fine. It should work ok with a bigger slave disk too, as long as the /boot partition is in the first 1023 sectors, or whatever that limitation is.

couple of things you could do.

[Loualbano2]

First thing, as some others have pointed out, is to go to the MB manufacturer instead of going to award. My guess is that with a 500 meg limit, the best bios upgrade would be for 2 gigs, and if you are really lucky, 8 gigs. Highly unlikely that you will find any bios upgrade unless it's a pretty good brand name board.

Second thing you could do is use a bios overlay. I used to know how these worked, but details are hazy. The jist was like this, the bios overlay would sit on the MBR of the drive, then when your bios recognized the drive and started to boot it, the overlay would over write the memory that contained the drive geometry. Or something like that.

Or you could get a promise controller or similar PCI IDE controller. Unless this box is too old for PCI this is your best bet. I have a couple P55T2P4 Asus boards with over 100 gigs of drive space in them even though the bios only recognizes up to 30 gig.

-Lou

I know the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an Asus motherboard from 2001 which I want to have the Bios upgraded on. But I can't, their download site has been unreachable for I don't know how long. Annoying.

This guy sells programmed BIOS chips

[unitron]

Congratulations on not feeding the landfill. To look into replacing the BIOS chip for about $20 go to http://www.tuxshield.com/BIOS_order.htm and use the email at the bottom of the page to contact the guy. This assumes that you don't have a flashable bios chip and replacement is the only way to go. Of course you could be like me and have an old Zeos 486 board that has a flashable bios but they went out of business before writing an updated bios that'll recognize anything over 528. Bummer.

It sounds as though you're trying to load the Linux CDs on a big hard drive, hook that drive up to the computer temporarily and load Linux on the machine's hard drive from the bigger drive instead of from a CD-ROM drive which you say the machine doesn't have. Consider temporarily installing a CD drive from some other machine and installing from that or temporarily installing a NIC from some other machine and installing via network.

If I can help you with hard drive questions, get in touch.

Re:This guy sells programmed BIOS chips

[SN74S181]

$20 is kinda stiff. Can I download the BIOS image from him and burn it myself on the ol' Needham programmer I have here?

Re:This guy sells programmed BIOS chips

[unitron]

I suggest that you go to the page I referenced and ask him yourself. How much are you paying for blank chips?

www.wimsbios.com

[dpash]

very useful site for finding bios and finding what motherboard you have.

BIOS overlays...

[adolf]

As some other posters have pointed out, you don't need to have BIOS-level access to the entire hard drive to get the machine to boot properly and run Linux. Just keep the bootable partition within the first 500 megs, and all is dandy.

However, you might want to use a BIOS overlay, anyway. Makes things easier, and lets you do stuff like run ancient DOS games on the hardware they were meant for, or fire up OS/2 Warp for an old-school look at the future.

On my 386SL-25 laptop, I'm using IBM's overlay software, which is freely downloadable as a bootable floppy disk image. Most other manufacturers also supply overlay software, free, but it generally requires you to install it on a machine with a drive of the same make; Maxtor's software needs to see a Maxtor drive somewhere in the system, or it will simply refuse to cooperate.

This works fine with Linux, and has for a very long time. It just recognizes that the drive was partitioned with overlay software, and does the same sector translation on its own.

I doubt there's even a speed hit.

I used IBM's software because I have a bunch of their SCSI disks in the machine I was borrowing to do the Linux install with, and Hitachi stands almost alone as a vendor who doesn't supply overlay software of their own. (the laptop, sadly, has no floppy drive, CD-ROM, or other external storage, so I spent most of an evening swapping IDE cables trying to get the thing to boot.)

Re:BIOS overlays...

[earlobe]

I think that http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download has the software you speak of, as well as several other useful utilities.

On a somewhat related note....

[orthogonal]

I've got an old 386 with a 100 Mb HDD, which runs (ran) Windows 3.11.

If I wanted to install linux on that box, what would be my best bet, as far as distros and teh mechanics of it (it's got a 3.5 floppy, but if I was serious about this I'd probably sptring for a NIC card).

As importantly, what could I expect from a 386 linux box?

Thanks.

Re:On a somewhat related note....

[Anonymous Coward]

dont bother. anything below a p-66 will be painfully slow.

Re:On a somewhat related note....

[ONOIML8]

"dont bother. anything below a p-66 will be painfully slow."

Absolutely 100% NOT true! I am running several systems that are 386 and 486 based. I have one system that is a 386DX-40MHz which is running an email to alphanumeric paging gateway and doing some automated housekeeping on a network and the damn thing hums right along.

I wouldn't want to use X on a 386, that's for sure. And on a 486 I would think twice about it, and run a very lite window manager (not KDE). But then again there are very few reasons to be running X anyway except for a desktop client.

Re:On a somewhat related note....

[ShawnD]

Absolutely 100% NOT true! I am running several systems that are 386 and 486 based

I used to run a 386SX40 as a file server. The BIOS didn't even have a problem with the 20GB and 30GB drives. It has since been replaced by a 100MHz PPC and has also taken on DNS for the home LAN.

Also note that some older Pentium's overclock well. I have a P75 that runs reliably at 133MHz. Just make sure you have a big heatsink (Like one for a P200 or similar). That may give you the performance you are looking for.

No dumpsters, please!

[fm6]

Not unless you like toxic metals in your coffee. Even if it's legal in your locale, it's hardly good citizenship to throw computer hardware into a landfill. If it's beyond use, take it to a recycler. Yes it costs. So does treating cancer.

Re:No dumpsters, please!

[Anonymous Coward]

I always save up old computer junk. We have a 'document shredder' at work that literally pulverizes anything put into it. I think it uses ultrasound. I strip out all the circuit cards, toss the metal enclosures, brackets, etc. into the dumpster, then put all the circuit boards, connectors, etc. into the pulverizer. It turns it all into a kind of coarse dust.

We go on backpacking trips up to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area several times each summer. We try to each pack in about fourty pounds of that coarse dust, to deposit at the headwaters of the streams in the Wildnerness.

Many of the components in coffee, even your pristine pure coffee brewed with organic beans and spring water, are carcinogenic. Perhaps you should stop drinking it.

What I did years ago.

[lewiscr]

My old 486 wouldn't handle a drive > 512Meg (including CD-ROMS). So I bought an EIDE card. A quick check on Pricewatch for "ISA EIDE Card" shows that Promise still makes them. It'll be pretty slow (the ISA bus can only transfer like 7 or 8 Meg/sec.) If the machine has PCI, you can go that route. But if this is an old machine, you probably don't need a performance powerhouse anyway.

My ISA card worked fine up to 8 Gig drives, but I would've needed a BIOS Overlay to use drives larger than 8 Gigs. YMMV.

Although... PriceWatch shows the cards as costing about $34 w/ S&H, so I guess the cheaper option would be to buy the BIOS upgrade.

And the "death is fun" people chime in...

[fm6]

Many of the components in coffee, even your pristine pure coffee brewed with organic beans and spring water, are carcinogenic. Perhaps you should stop drinking it.

So what you're saying is, we can't eliminate all the possible causes of cancer, therefore we shouldn't try to eliminate any, and we especially shouldn't worry about creating new ones. Yeah, that makes sense!

A Fine Vintage BIOS...

[fooguy]

Chances are good that the vendor never updated the BIOS. Some of us remember the glory days when harddrive size had a BIOS limitation.

You have two options:

1) Buy a replacement BIOS ROM from someone like Mr. BIOS (yes, I said "Mr. BIOS")

2) Use a Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO). A DDO is a piece of software that is, in effect, a bootstrap virus. It loads code in the bootblock that builds a new drive map at boot time. While BIOS only seens four or five hundred megs, a DDO will get you to the next physical barrier (which, if I'm not mistaken is either 2GB or 4GB).

DDOs were used successfully for a very long time, though I remember avoiding them at the time. They're creepy. Most HD vendors use to offer then for free (WD, Maxtor), you should be able to dig one up on an abandonware site.

Agreement!

[twitter]

I had the same problem. My solution was to use a 500 MB hard disk to boot. It might have worked if I simply partitioned a small boot device on a larger drive but I used the disk I had. The other disk is now a 2 GB, but it could just as well be 20 or 200 GB. The kernel does not use crusty old BIOS routines after boot and can see anything just as well on any machine.

Making the second drive the home directory was as easy as dropping the hard drive in, formatting it with cfdisk, adding a file system with mkext2fs, coppying my files and changing a single line in /etc/fstab and rebooting. Rebooting was optional. It took way less time than fooling around with a bios upgrade that might or might not work. If ever I need another IDE channel, I've got an old 16 bit card that supposedly gives me one, but two devices are enough for me for now.

Yep, the 66MHz 486 is still AOK as an ftp server. No GUI needed, never down for anything but power fails, always chugging along but always quiet. Thank you Debian.