New IDE drive in old PC

[Gayn Winters]

> 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!  

Good luck, 

-gayn

Bristol Systems Inc.
714/532-6776
www.bristolsystems.com