Help with installation.

[Kevin J. Cummings]

James Mounts wrote:
> You will want to look at a couple of things actually...
> 
> 1. does your 40GIG drive have a 1/2 capacity jumper, and if so is it enabled ( that would account for 20 out of 40 gigs being recognized )

More importantly, go and read the Large-Disk-Drive-HOWTO.  It talks 
about various IDE limitations and where they come from.  Certain BIOSes 
had a 32GB limitation, and my new 120GB HD has a 32GB capacity 
limitation jumper.  I think its the difference between LBA and LBA48 in 
the BIOS.  Many old MB just won't support (all of) today's large IDE drives.

> 2. your super7 board probably needs an update, find out who made your board and go to their respected site and look for a bios update. You can get the exact bios revision from the boot bios string that "should" appear at the bottom of the screen during the post screen (mostly before p4 board, some intel p3 boards don’t have that. But you have a super7 board,..IE k6-200)

While this can help, you are probably better off finding hard drives 
that are within the capacity that your MB BIOS will support.  And 
Flashing a BIOS is not for the faint of heart.  Doing it wrong can 
easily turn your MB into a door stop.

> as for your system detected issues, it might have something to do with the cpu's MHZ that was detected. I "THINK" FC 2 + can detect how fast the cpu is during install, and will halt on older systems. Though I NEVER seen this, even with an install on a p133.

I was running K6-2/3D processors at 400 and then 500 MHz (though the 500 
MHz required the latest BIOS for my old motherboard, which luckily all 
of my MBs had).  Even so, I upgraded my MB, CPU, and memory from the 
500MHz K6-2/3D, w/256MB to an AMD Athlon-XP 2600+ with 512 MB of memory 
before I upgraded from RH9 to FC2.  My cost a year ago was just a bit 
more than US$200 for the upgrade (I already had the new ATX case/PS).

> IF that is the case, look into your systems FASTEST supported cpu, typically for older super7 boards I think it’s a k6-350 ( with a multiplier mod on some older biostar boards ) I know you can pocket a k6 2-450 for about 30 bucks from a used computer store, or 20 shipped from Ebay.com.

Depending on both your MB and your BIOS this could be 350 or 400 or 500 
or 550MHz.  K6-2 chips are becoming scarce from vendors.

> I don’t have any hdd's that are less then 20 gigs these days, so I cannot confirm whether or not FC3 can install on a drive less then 6.4gigs. you might want to consider dropping the smaller drive OR using it as a data dump drive just so it doesn’t go to waist.

The same with hdds.  I was able to find a 30GB hdd for my son's system 
for US$43 last year.  Its just about the largest hdd the system will 
support due to the 32GB BIOS limitation.  NOTE:  while running RH9, I 
was able to play with CONFIG_IDE_STROKE in the 2.4 Linux kernel and I 
was able to use all 120GB of my new drive (just before I bought the new 
MB/CPU/Mem combo) on the old K6 MB.  The drive was jumpered to 32GB for 
the system BIOS (otherwise the BIOS just hung), but the 
CONFIG_IDE_STROKE kernel option initialized the IDE disk with LBA-48 and 
ignored the BIOS size during the kernel boot-up.  But I ended up 
removing the jumper, and re-partitioned anyways when I got the new 
MB.... [and then upgraded to FC-2].

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us