Now here's something for FreeBSD advocacy

andrew clarke mail at ozzmosis.com
Sat Aug 21 10:44:04 PDT 2004


On Thu, 5 Aug 2004, Daniel Rudy wrote:

> I'm taking an older computer and making it into a lightweight server
> for various uses.  Things like usenet, email, ftp, and web.  The
> motherboard is a FIC VA-503+ v1.2.  The CPU is a AMD K6-2 at 500MHz
> and 128MB Ram. It has a 13.6GB primary harddisk as well.  All of this
> is in a full tower AT case with a 300W power supply.  For my personal
> use, it's a decent system.  Oh, and I'm using FreeBSD 4.10R.
>
> Well, for the server functions, I needed to add another harddisk into
> the system.  I went out and got a Maxtor 80GB harddisk and installed it
> into the system.  Then I went into the BIOS to tell the computer about
> the harddisk, and when the BIOS tried to calculate the size of the disk,
> it would hang the system.  I couldn't even boot.  So, I set the drive
> type to NONE, and let the system boot up into FreeBSD.  I was going to
> take the computer back apart and install a special IDE controller card
> that I had laying around for just this type of incident.
>
> On the kernel boot, guess what I saw...My new harddisk.  I was stunned.
> After I recovered from my shock, I started up sysinstall.  It took the
> fdisk, disk label, and newfs with no complaints.  I added the entry to
> /etc/fstab and then rebooted.  Drive is still there and mounted, ready
> for use.

Concidentally I've just set up PC here with similar specs (K6-2 300, 256
Mb) running 4.10-REL.  I'd been put off the idea of installing a backup
hard disk of that size with the assumption that the BIOS wouldn't work
with it and so FreeBSD couldn't either.  So, thanks for the info,
Daniel.

Regards
Andrew


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