driskdrake problem with new 75GB hard drive

[polemicz]

I couldn't resist a new WD 75GB plus 256MB ram special at Best Buy. The plan is to move my linux from a dual boot hda of 15GB (with Win 98SE). Installed drive and formatted it as Fat32, checked it with fdisk and shows 9729 cylinders. Go to install another Mdk 9 on this drive, but when I get to partitioning it initially shows the full disk size, but won't partition beyond 32MB. Now, after installation (I have two Mdk 9's one on hda and the other on hdb both work fine) fdsisk only shows 4111 cylinders on hdb. should it not show the 4112-9729 as still being Fat32 or did diskdrake mess me up and if so how do I get access to the rest of this disk. Am thinking of playing with another distro on this disk. Thanks in advance.

[polemicz]

Figured it's a BIOS problem, fdisk actually shows a 9729 cylinder FAT32 partition, but also only says there are 4111 cylinders, so it can't create partitions beyond cyl 4111. Oh well, it's still a good deal ($50 for the hd + extra 256MB ram) and I guess I'll get the rest of the hd available when I upgrade my MB and processor within the next year. The alternative is upgrading my BIOS, but never having done that I'm a bit leary. Is it much of a process?

[DragonMage]

Well.. motherboards made in the last 2 years or so have really simple bios upgrade methods. All you have to do is download the .zip or .exe file, extract the content into a dos bootable disk, then boot the computer using that disk and run the resulting .exe file and it will do the update automatically for you.