[TriLUG] IDE Hard disk limitations BIOS and Linux

[Rick DeNatale]

A few days ago I asked for Hard disk recommendations to add some large
hard disk(s) to my old IBM Intelistation M 6889.

After trying to research IDE hard disks, I've gotten more and more
confused about the the size limits for IDE drives.

I'm not sure how old this machine is, but it seems to have the latest
BIOS available which is dated May 12, 2000 (or at least that's what
the download page says, I haven't yet re-booted, gotta keep uptime
going!).  This machine has both SCSI and IDE interfaces. It's got two
9GB SCSI drives in it now but the only IDE devices are a CD/ROM and a
DVD Writer.

So how do I figure out how big an IDE drive I can add to this machine,
before I spend my money?

How do I verify what the BIOS supports?  The Tech Ref says that it
supports LBA for drives bigger than 528 MB, which seems to imply that
it might well be limited to 120GB or less.

Do I even need to worry about this. If I'm only running Linux I
understand that the kernel doesn't even use the BIOS is this right? I
figure that I'm going to keep the SCSI drives, and one of them will
still be the boot device.