[tlug] Large Disk on Old Hardware.

["Greg Thomson " <gregt@example.com>]

Greetings All,

I'd like to install an 80GB hard drive in an old (soon to be ex) Win98  
system and am in need of some help.

The plan is to turn this old machine into a file server (samba) and local  
IMAP server (Dovecot) for my parents home network. I won't be setting up  
the system until December when I visit them for Christmas but thought I'd  
better start checking things out now.

As I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong, is that old BIOSes  
don't recognize the full capacity of large hard disks. The limit depends  
on the generation of the BIOS, but provided /boot is located within the  
portion of the disk recognized by the BIOS the kernel can boot. The  
bootloader can pass the true geometry of the disk to the kernel. The  
kernel can then access all of the disk. Is that right?

While I think I understand the theory  I'm not clear on how to put it into  
practice.

There seem to be a number of kernel options that have changed as kernel  
support has developed. From what I've read support in recent kernels is  
good.
What boot time options are appropriate? Should I use append to give drive  
geometry?

What BIOS settings are needed? LBA?

What about formating issues?

Is the manufacturer of the disk drive important?

A lot of the material I have read mentions LILO as the boot loader.
Are things different under GRUB?

I am planning on using Xubuntu as the distro.

Any adivce, personnal expereinces, tips, greatly appreciated.

Much thanks,

Greg.