New IDE drive in old PC

[Robert Slade]

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.

Rob