Re: 200GB IDE disk on old system

In article <slrnf07ie0.jn8.wb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Wilhelm B. Kloke <wb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Helmut Schneider <jumper99@xxxxxx> schrieb:
Wilhelm B. Kloke (wb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
I want to put a 200GB into my old AMD K6 system. The BIOS does not support
more than 32GB. Is there a way to persuade FreeBSD to accept the
real disk size?

What mainboard do you have? My good old P55T2P4(?) had no problems with big
disks after a BIOS update.

It is an Epox Socket 7 board (MVG3 or so). On the Epox site it is not listed
anymore, so a BIOS update is not possible without finding some other source.
I don't need to boot from this disk, so, lastly it is of little relevance
what the BIOS thinks. The problem is that I need a way to ignore the
wrong information from BIOS. I could even consider using GPT partitions on
the disk (which I have to learn about anyway, as I want to netboot my
MacMini to FreeBSD some day). But, "gpt create" also uses the wrong
BIOS data.

I'm running a 120gig 'master drive ond secondary controller', on an old
COMPAQ Persario that has a claimed bios limit of 8.45gigs. FreeBSD 6.2
recognizes the full capacity, but, just to be safe, i setup several 'fdisk'
slices, and made the first one 8 gigs.

Using 'sysinstall' to create the fdisk partition, and then the BSD labels,
it did pick up the actual drive geometry, declared that that was 'not a
reasonable geometry', scaled up the number of heads, and took the number of
cylinders down proportionately. Seems to work O, although i'e got somewhere
over a megabyte of 'unclaimable' space at the end of the disk -- it's less
than what FreeBSD "thinks" is one cylinder, thus it can't allocate it into
a slice.
.

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