New IDE drive in old PC

[Gayn Winters]

> 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