Quote Originally Posted by solaris
The second disk is the problem. Out of the box, the 20GB was the machine's original and only HD. After I installed the 120GB for movies and mp3s, the 20GB became the Linux playground. Now, running Knoppix from the CD, it could see the entire 20GB DOS partition that was there. (Knoppix cannot mount the 120 as it is, of course ) But when I decided to go for the poor man's install, I wanted the "CD" to have its own partion, and discovered that both cfdisk and qtparted see only an 8 GB disk there. First, both told me the existing partition exceeded the disk space and could not proceed. So from DOS I used fdisk. As a blank, unformatted disk, cfdisk and qtparted still only saw 8GB. It would allow me to make DOS and ext2 partitions with that 8GB, but it did not see the remaining space. I tried every thing I could think of--included loading up the diskwith several small partitions with fdisk, hoping I could reformat them with qtparted--but no matter what, Knoppix sees 8 GB and DOS sees 20, unless I make a DOS partition of the whole drive and run Knoppix from the CD, but then it can only read and write to the disk, not reformat it.

The current setup is I have two partitions, hdb1 with about 6GB for files, and hdb2 with about 2GB for the poor man's install. From DOS/Windows, fdisk sees a drive with 8GB formatted and 12GB free, while Linux sees only 8GB.
That seems a little strange if anything that board should have the 32gb HD limit not the 8gb one. Do you have a setting in the BIOS where you can turn on LBA for the hard drives? If so turn it on. Can you post the output of fdisk -l (the linux fdisk not DOS) so we can see it? Both before and after turning on the LBA if possible. And just to be sure the jumpers are set properly on the drives eg. the master is set to master and the slave set to slave not none of that cable select foolishness linux sometimes reacts badly to the cable select.