>The bios on newer PCs can access a disk with two methods.  For compatibility,
>it supports the old method with its 1024 cylinder limitation.  The newer
>method allows access to much larger disks (I'd have to look it up again,
>if you need to know the exact number, but believe me, there is quite some
>room left, even with todays rapidly growing disk sizes).

right...the old cylinder/head/sector method.  and i believe the new
method is called logical block addressing.  the older method, if i'm
not mistaken limited you to booting from the first 500 megs.

fwiw - my bios offers "standard ide" and "enhanced ide".  given that
the laptop is about a month old, i'm guessing that it's gonna support
both.

>The netbsd bootmanager (as well as the standard netbsd mbr, and the netbsd
>partition bootcode) does use the bios to read the kernel from disk, just as
>its linux/freebsd counterparts.  It does however try to use the newer method,
>it it determines that the old method wouldn't work.  Thus it is able to
>boot from partitions beyond the 8GB limit.

um...do you perhaps have those to slightly backwards there?  :)

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