New IDE drive in old PC

[dgmm]

On Thursday 29 December 2005 17:57, Chris Whitehouse wrote:
> I presume you mean GB for size. I just plugged a 250GB drive into a PIII
> 500 Supermicro board. The bios thinks it is 8GB. I get No Rom Basic if I
> try to boot. I also tried it as an external USB drive and fdisk'd and
> bsdlabelled it as 250GB without problem using FBSD6.
>
> I think if I could have booted there would have been no problem with the
> disk on the IDE chain as FBSD sees disks directly not through the BIOS
> (or so I understand).

FWIW my file/print server is old too.  CPU is an AMD K6/2-350.  It boots from 
a 20GB drive and then FreeBSD sees the 160GB and 40GB drives.  The BIOS sees 
the 40GB drive as 8GB and doesn't see the 160GB drive at all.  I set all but 
the primary master BIOS drive settings to NONE.

I also learned to my cost when experimenting with installing FreeBSD that 
setting the BIOS to NONE for an HDD which is actually plugged in doesn't stop 
FreeBSD from seeing it or formatting it when I slected the "first" drive as 
the one to slice up ;-)

-- 
Dave