New IDE drive in old PC

Chris Whitehouse chris at childeric.freeserve.co.uk
Thu Dec 29 09:57:35 PST 2005


> 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?

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).

I can test on a P5AB if you want but it will take a day or two.

Chris


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