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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

My friend for whom we made a computer to take to school reports that the 
2GB drive died (he checked with Maxtor's utility after e2fsck and mke2fs 
could not fix it, kept doing resets and producing garbage).  Low-level 
format did not help either.  For some odd reason, the first partition 
(BL2) was still working but the second one was unusable.   He had not 
changed any settings in CMOS, one day things just went haywire after he 
had not used the computer for a week.

So he bought for $30 after rebate the cheapest smallest drive from Best 
Buy, which is 80GB.  He had to move some jumpers to get BIOS to recognize 
32GB.  He asks if he needs to upgrade the BIOS to find the rest of it. 
Ebay had cheaper 4GB drives but people wanted up to $20 shipping on them!

Will linux (BL) ignore the BIOS here (is the kernel compiled to do so) and 
find the whole drive?

If not, can he download an award bios of the proper age (the manufacturer 
stopped supporting that 1997 board in 2000, at 3 years old) and upgrade 
that way, or must it be manufacturer specific?

He will use it only for linux.

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org