Now here's something for FreeBSD advocacy

[Daniel Rudy]

At about the time of 08/05/2004 13:25, Szilveszter Adam stated the
following:
> Hello Daniel,
> 
> On Thu, Aug 05, 2004 at 02:31:47AM -0700, Daniel Rudy wrote:
> 
>>FreeBSD does it again.
> 
> 
> <...>
> 
> Not to ruin your joy over a working hw setup, but in fact pretty much
> all decent PC OSs these days (the list is long, but does *not* include
> any version of DOS, for example) can do what FreeBSD did in this case
> just fine. The BIOS is no longer used by the OS to access the disk, but
> the BIOS needs to recognize the drive at least in part in order to be
> able to boot the OS from it (obviously). So, the lesson to take home
> here is this: unless you want to boot from a disk, you pretty much do
> not have to worry about the BIOS these days using eg FreeBSD. This does
> not include broken BIOS implementations, that actually crash and refuse
> to boot with an overly large drive even if the type is set to NONE. (I
> have seen such thing unfortunately) Luckily, there is almost always a
> last BIOS update even for older boards from sometime around 1999 because
> of the Y2K madness, and these usually include support for larger drives
> as well.
> 

This wasn't the boot drive.  The 80GB HD is for data storage only.  It's
mounted as /space.  The boot drive is a 13.6GB drive.  I have the
lastest BIOS from the manufacturer and it does not support harddisks
beyond 32GB even though the hardware supports the max of 137GB.  If I
had to, I have a Promise Ultra133TX or something or another that FreeBSD
does recongize if setting the BIOS to none didn't work.

>>Kudos to the FreeBSD development teams.
> 
> 
> Indeed.


-- 
Daniel Rudy