RE: New IDE drive in old PC
- From: "Gayn Winters" <gayn.winters@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:14:00 -0800
> On Behalf Of Gayn Winters
> Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2005 10:04 AM
> > On Behalf Of RW
> > Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2005 9:18 AM
> > On Wednesday 28 December 2005 07:14, Robert Slade wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2005-12-27 at 22:12, Robert Ames wrote:
> > > > I have an old (very old) ASUS P5 motherboard running
> FreeBSD 5.4.
> > > > The boot disk is a 40MB Western Digital WD400 IDE drive
> > jumpered to
> > > > only use 32MB so it can be booted from since the BIOS in this PC
> > > > (the latest and greatest) can't deal with anything larger
> > than 32MB.
> > > > This PC is working well for me and I don't want to upgrade it.
> > > > However I would like to add a lot of disk space. So my question
> > > > is, can I go out and buy a new 300 GB (or whatever) IDE disk and
> > > > attach it to the secondary IDE controller and hope to
> use all 300
> > > > GB? I will still use the old disk for booting and to
> hold the OS.
> > > > The new disk will be just for data. If this will "just
> > work" how do
> > > > I configure the BIOS so the PC will boot with the large
> > drive installed?
> > >
> > > Robert,
> > >
> > > If you had to jumper the boot disk for it to work with the
> > BIOS of the motherboard, then the chances are that you would have to
> do the same
> > > with the 2nd hard drive.
> > >
> > > ISTR that ASUS produced updated BIOS' for most of their
> > motherboards to get around this. Have a look at their website to see
> if there is and
> > > upgrade. There is also a area on the site for questions
> > such as yours.
> >
> > I would have thought the main issue is support for 48-bit
> > LBA. The limit for 32-bit LBA is 137GB (128 GiB).
>
> Since the OP wants more disk space and somehow can't upgrade this old
> BIOS (the preferred option), separate the issue into two:
> 1. How to boot
> 2. How to access the large disk.
>
> I haven't tried it, but if you installed the large drive as a second
> disk, then you could boot off the older (jumpered even) hard drive.
> Even if the BIOS doesn't see the second hard drive, it
> probably won't go
> belly up. I would think FreeBSD would then see the second
> drive when it
> booted and handle it correctly (since FreeBSD doesn't use the BIOS for
> access.) Map the second drive as /data and enjoy.
>
> I recommend putting the old drive as primary (master) on the first IDE
> channel and putting the new drive as slave or as master on the second
> IDE channel.
>
> I don't think trying this risks data on your old drive, but back it up
> anyway!
Chuck Swinger's caveat will apply to the above:
FreeBSD will use LBA addressing modes, even if your BIOS does not
support it.
However, to access a drive above 137GB, your hardware needs to support
48-bit LBA.
However, you can get a PCI ATA controller to do the job which is cheap
and
convenient, or simply update your MB to something newer...
--
-Chuck
-gayn
Bristol Systems Inc.
714/532-6776
www.bristolsystems.com
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