raw disk copying?

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Wed, 2006-04-26 02:59:33 -0400, der Mouse <mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca> wrote:
> > [Note that there are bugs in many early BIOSes that will crash with
> > accesses beyond typically at limits beyond 2GB, 1GB or even 512MB.)
> 
> Sometimes even worse than that.  I have one machine that apparently
> simply won't work if a disk over some size (64G? I don't know the exact
> limit) is touched by the BIOS - it wedges.  But if I tell the BIOS
> there's nothing there and let the OS kernel find it, it works fine.  (I
> remarked on this to a vendor I know who told me my motherboard was so
> old it wasn't surprising it wasn't comptaible with newer disks.  Gee,
> it was all of what, three years old.  Oh well, another reason - as if I
> needed more! - to avoid peecees.)

Jeah, a true and known story. I faced that several times, too. The
usual advise is to switch off the disk in BIOS's configuration menus,
but that only works as long as you don't need to boot off that disk.

Also some BIOSes in about the 1998 probe _all_ disks, even if they're
configured off, to display the vendor/model name. That'll crash some
mainboards, too :-(

MfG, JBG

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