How does Linux recognise that drive when the BIOS doesn't?

I have an old HP Pavilion 7850 in my house that serves as my home server. A place where I find an excuse to serve anything over the home network. I found it in the hallway in the house. My cousin had it and said that it wasn't working. Apparently Windows ME was just blue screening on it, apart from that it worked just fine. So apparently it must have just sat there for years not doing anything. So I take it and played with installing Linux distros on it at first. I tried Slackware which had an X misconfiguration in the version I installed, so all I got was command line. Needless to say I still haven't gone back to look at Slackware. I tried Fedora which was okay I suppose and OpenSUSE which was also okay but slow. It was only when I heard the Lugradio (I miss you guys! Bring the show back!!!) guys talk about it that I thought it might be a good idea to try out Ubuntu. Of course going on 3 years I'm still using it and don't plan on going back to anything else unless it's to 'try it out'.

In any case, somewhere in that time I began to set up the HP box as a home server. It would be the first time I try to do power user stuff with Linux. I went with Gentoo. Gentoo worked great and more importantly gentoo-wiki.com had stuff on it. So I used it for awhile. Then I accidentally wipe out have the var folder with a miswritten rsync command. It takes a week and a half to reinstall all the packages.

After that for some reason the drive moves incredibly slowly. I think all that reading and writing in the recompile of all those pacakages worsened the health of the mere 40giger considerably. So I get another old 20gig drive put Ubuntu on that, and make the 40 gig drive the /home folder. Of course the drive is still slow and 40gigs is laughable for a file server. So, it took awhile because I'm broke, but I get a 400gig drive for the machine. Install, format and mount it and it works fine. Except when I try to run Spinrite.

Spinrite would of course be the main sponsor of the Security Now podcast :) The first 15 minutes of the show is basically a Spinrite infomercial. Which is fine if it works, and he needs to eat. I didn't really need it of course, but back then I had a job and I'm a problematically compulsive shopper when it comes to electronics. That part is a whole other story. I try to run it and Spinrite doesn't see it. I e-mail Spinrite tech support and they say to check and see if the BIOS recognises it. It doesn't. Spinrite tech support suggests upgrading the BIOS. So I check the HP site and there are two BIOS upgrade download options, and the directions on their site for distinguishing the right one doesn't work here. I ask HP tech support to see which is the right one based on the serial no and they tell me. I try to install it and it still doesn't work. This entire journey of e-mail sending and searching and serial no. scribbling and floppy disk formatting brings me to the reaffirmation that this is an old-ass machine that doesn't support more than 80gig drives. tough noogies.

So this leaves me with three questions. How does Linux see the drive if the BIOS doesn't? I suppose it doesn't have to talk to ROM to interface with the IDE controller. Well, in any case 'Linux is awesome' is the lesson to learn from this ordeal.

The next question is why does Spinrite need the BIOS to see the drive if Linux doesn't? The answer of course is that Steve Gibson is a Microsoft guy, and Spinrite runs in DOS, booting off of FreeDOS, and DOS needs the BIOS to see the drive if Spinrite is going to see the drive. WHICH BLOWS!!! The only other option would be to either take the drive out and put it in my gaming desktop whenever I want to run Spinrite, which is a pain in the ass, or buy a pair of those removable drive trays which is a financial pain in the ass, especially as far as restraining my electronics shopping compulsion is concerned. You'll never hear Steve Gibson bring up that point in all those letters (Well it'd be silly if he did and he probably may have at some point, but it still sucks)

And the last question is, does Spinrite plan on supporting these drives in software? Are the mechanisms that it uses too low-level and thus need to have BIOS support? Will he ever move Spinrite off of DOS? Will it ever support large drives on old machines where there is no BIOS support? Spinrite wasn't cheap you know. With all its fancy algorithms I hope he puts that feature in the next release.