[Tfug] Bootloader Issues

[Nathanial Hendler]

I'm out of ideas regarding this.  I think buying a smaller HD would make all
of my troubles go away, but that's too easy.

I have an old laptop (10 year old Toshiba 420CDT) with a bios that doesn't
seem to support more than a 20GB drive (when I try to partition a 40GB drive
in it with fdisk, it only sees 20GB).  So, I have put a 40GB drive in it
that I had lieing around, and tried installing Debian on it.  Debian
installs without complaint, but GRUB won't boot.  I tried LILO too.  One
time I installed using the whole disk as one large partition.  Then I tried
having a small (5GB) root partition and a /home partition that was 10GB so
no part of the OS was over 20GB.  Didn't work.

I put FreeDOS on a 5gb partition.  Using the FreeDOS bootloader, it would
boot FreeDOS just fine.  I then installed linux on the next 13GB, and
pointed the FreeDOS booatloader at the linux primary partition, but it
wouldn't boot linux (no surprise).

Any ideas on how to get this drive to work?  You can tell me to buy a new
drive, I had a smaller drive on it running linux just fine, but at this
point I'm just curious why I can't do this.  It doesn't seem like I
shouldn't be able to run linux with this setup as long as I stay within the
first 20GB of the drive.

Thanks,
Nathan