[Gllug] Large hard drives on old motherboards

[James de Lurker]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Gllug] Large hard drives on old motherboards
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 10:16:40 -0000
From: Jonathan Dye
Reply-To: gllug at linux.co.uk

Jonathan Dye wrote:
> I'm looking to get hold of an old pentium computer and stick a large hard
> drive in it to use for storage.  What I'm not usre about is whether I will
> have any problems using a large (say 60Gig) IDE drive with an old
> motherboard.

That depends ;-) ( What the EIDE drive is, mostly )


> I know there are problems with the bios being able to boot from large hard
> drives but I understood that as long as the BIOS could see the partition
> with the boot image in it (and the boot image was visible to the BIOS too)
> then it would boot OK and when linux loaded it talked directly to the IDE
> controller.  So I guess my question is that assuming I am right with the
> BIOS issue will I have any problems from the IDE controller and large disks?

Yes, you may have issues if the entry point to any of your "active" 
partitions are beyond the 1G or 8G point, depending upon the BIOS. 
Unhooked, and native, that is. No, you need not have any IDE issues, that
depends upon the chipset as much as the BIOS firmware.

Check to see if the BIOs is flashable, and see about upgrading it if it
is still in its production release state.


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Gllug] Large hard drives on old motherboards
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 11:34:32 +0000 (GMT)
From: Shevek

 >I doubt you will manage to break the 32Gb barrier since I believe that
 >involves an electrical difference in the interface. I suspect you will
 >manage to drive anything up to 32Gb in software even though the BIOS can't
 >see it. I doubt you will manage to boot off the disk. I never experimented
 >much because it was easier to boot off floppy than to even bother trying.

I have dealt with a range of legacy machines ( 5 ) without any issues, 
because I try to use BIOS "extender" code. Seagate did a deal with one
company to support their drives; Maxtor with another. I've had success
with both approaches, but in the last four years the BIOs extender software
of choice has been "MaxBlast" with Maxtor Drives. I may go back to Seagate
though.

My workhorse legacy fileserver is a mid-range backup server from  a
developer intranet used in 1996. An ancient P90 Classic Pentium 48M machine
with a SCSI subsystem. And one of the IDE channels channels defective, but
the primary one still turnin' and burnin'... Last BIOS flash update was
1997.

Currently serving files from a 12G NTFS partition and a 10G ext2 one.

Currently setup triple boot on a Maxblast enabled 40G Maxtor VL HD.
141M ext2 /boot selinux; 768M Win95; 2G NT4 Server PDC NTFS. All primaries.
Fourth is extended. Then 3 * FAT16 logicals. Cute trick is to install
NT as "C:\WINDOWS" and use a common D: application target drive from both
NT and Win9x.

Rule 1: NEVER install a Linux bootloader into the MBR, only the /boot part.
         There are issues ( LBA != CHS mis-setting ) with lilo, but it is
         possible to live with that. Do _all_ the necessary Disk Management
         from the Windows tools before installing Linux. last. I don't
         recommend Grub with BIOS extender / multiboot arrangements.

Rule 2: UNIX fdisk and other low level partition (re)writing tools are not
         particular about the order partitions appear in the table. MS-DOG
         and Windows anything most certainly IS! _NEVER_ allow the linux
         install process to fsck with the partition tables and install Linux
         last into prepared ext2 partitions. BIOS extender or no.

Rule 3: If you also have SCSI drives connected, get 'em OUT before
         installing Linux, or you'll probably lose the contents / nuke the
         drive partition structure as lilo goes into the IDE disk!


I tend to use Partition Magic to set up all the partitions, and Norton 
Ghost to shift images of partitions. Cute thing about Ghost images is that
"Ghost Explorer" will allow you to browse an entire ext2 filesystem on a
Windows box, file by file, on the most highly compressed of CDR images.
Use -Z9 full compression to create an intermediate file, not direct to CD.
( Or DVD, if you are fortunate enough to have a R/W one )

Happy to go into more detail, or work out a structure / procedure that
best suits your needs for your box of choice, offlist

Be aware though, of bloat for the latest Linux desktops, and hardware
driver issues ( If you have S3 video cards ) KDE or GNOME on top of X
are most unhappy in much less than 64M of DRAM. My typical desktop suspends
when I go to another command line tty at 109M ! Expect (inefficient)
swapping compared with Windows Desktops on the same machine. Best use
something like FVWM or similar if memory constraints apply.

-- 

   -- James

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