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Adding hard disks

BIOS support for disks larger than 1024 cylinders

Disks with more than 1024 cylinders are supported with the following restrictions:

You can use the rest of the disk for swap space, the root filesystem and additional filesystems.

The BIOS on some IDE, most EIDE and UDMA, and all SCSI disk controllers allows remapping or translation of large disks so that they appear to have less than 1024 cylinders. For example, the extended BIOS for the Adaptec 1542, 1742, and 274x controllers allows 2GB SCSI disks to be mapped as 255 heads, 63 sectors and 255 cylinders.

If you are upgrading your system rather than performing a new installation, the root filesystem must fit within 1024 cylinders because there is no separate boot filesystem in this case.


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© 2003 Caldera International, Inc. All rights reserved.
SCO OpenServer Release 5.0.7 -- 11 February 2003