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OS can't see beyond 1023 cylinders

 
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# 1  
Old 02-27-2003
OS can't see beyond 1023 cylinders
I'm trying to install SCO 5.0.5 onto a workstation for test purposes. I've had no problems during the installation and everything seems to have gone well until I look at the disk space available - it's a 40 Gb IDE hard drive but the OS only seems to be seeing the first 1023 cylinders. Have tried fdisk to recreate partition using whole disk, but fdisk only sees the first 1023 cylinders also. I have read the information about BIOS only seeing the first 1023 cylinders, and hence needing your boot partition to be within this range, but I thought that SCO wasn't limited by this. Have I misunderstood this? Does anyone know what I need to do to be able to use the whole drive?Smilie
# 2  
Old 02-27-2003
The SCO OS isn't limited by this - it's a limitation of the BIOS.

Read the man page on SCO OS5 boot - it has information that would be helpful...like the following.

Quote:

hard disk
The hard disk can be split into up to four partitions, each of which can contain an operating system. The BIOS is not aware of partitioning, and loads sector 0 of the disk. This contains the masterboot software, which scans the disk partition table for the active partition. The masterboot then loads logical sector 0 from the active partition, and passes control to it.
The SCO masterboot software can boot arbitrary partitions, unlike some other operating systems. It also contains the geometry information for hard disks which are too large for the BIOS to access properly.

Masterboot loads a program called hdboot0. This loads the next stage, hdboot1, which resides at logical block 3 of the same partition. It then loads 20KB of contiguous data.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been an 'expert' on this OS to come forward to be able to answer these questions here. But you can search through this site and find links to other sites that have FAQs and other info.
# 3  
Old 02-27-2003
Thanks for this - has more detail than the information I have found so far. With a bit a luck I will be able to suss it out from here.
# 4  
Old 03-09-2003
Isn't that barrier a bios problem, same as the CHS back in the 90's.

Might just be a patchable issue, or a translation thing...
 
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