[ILUG] dying hard disc - upgrade questions?

[Brian Foster]

 with apologies to Messrs Belushi and Aykroyd...‥

   “I've got a a new SUSE 9.1,
    a 250Gb hard disc,
    more CDR then I know what to do with,
    a full bottle of wine and a long weekend,
    SETI at home is stopped,
    it's sunny,
    and I'm in a dark room.

    let's go!‟

 it appears the motherboard chipset is ATAPI,
 so ≥ c.137Gb isn't a problem (the issue here
 isn't the BIOS or Linux, it's whether or not
 the control-bus supports LBA48);

 an USB external drive may be Ok for backups but
 that's it (bandwidth), and the only units in
 the shops here are small and very €xpensive;

 the dying 40Gb apparently has a 2Mb cache, so
 I've been using(?) an IDE-cache for c.2 yrs w/o
 previously noticing;

 haven't checked the BIOS yet about boot options,
 I'll worry about that later (and yes, there will
 be a GRUB/LILO on each drive in any case);

 still don't have a completely consistent picture
 of how extended partitions work --- concern here
 is the non-Linux systems (e.g., BSD and Plan9,
 but not DoS/Windross which I do not use and do
 not even own) I'd like to try.  main confusion
 at the moment is how many logicals per extended
 there can be?  I've read that whilst Linux does
 support more than one, other systems may not;
 also, the max is either 1 (as per above), or 3,
 or "more‟....   (plus, in any case, another
 extended) --- very confusing!   ;-(

cheers!
	-blf-
-- 
«How many surrealists does it take to    |  Brian Foster      Montpellier,
 change a lightbulb?  Three.  One calms  |  blf at utvinternet.ie      France
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 with brightly-colored machine tools.»   |        http://www.stopesso.com