New IDE drive in old PC

[RW]

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).