Are very large disks supported?
There is an upper limit on the size of the disk partition that’s used for booting. This limit applies to all operating systems, not just Linux, and not just Debian Linux. Basically, the BIOS’s typically available on PC’s cannot access disk partitions larger than 1024 cylinders or tracks. Thus, any operating system used on a PC cannot be booted from a disk partition larger than 1 GByte. It’s worth emphasizing that this restriction only applies to the partition from which Linux is booted. Other partitions can be larger. One solution to this limitation is to place the directory /boot/ in its own (very small) partition, entirely within the first 1024 blocks of the disk. Recent versions of the Linux kernel include the the Multi-Device disk driver (‘md’), which provides striping support (sometimes called RAID 0) in software as well as a linear mode of joining 2 or more disks into a single logical device that can be formatted as a single file system.
