[TriLUG] Any problems with a 160 GB IDE disk?

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Aaron S. Joyner wrote:

> Just to cover the obvious for this thread... have you checked for BIOS
> updates from the manufacturer?

Machines that are old enough to have BIOSs which are limited in the disk
size usually don't have BIOS upgrades available. For many boards it's
often hard to track down who made them. From my experience in this area
there are different BIOS's for each sub-sub-revision of the board.

However I thought this a good idea myself too and it was the first thing I
did. Got new ROMs from someone with a name like DR BIOS, and plugged them
in (didn't want any problems with flashing a ROM and having a dead
machine) - it was guaranteed to work. It didn't - the machine hardly
booted and I had to turn off the L2 cache to allow it to do something
(forget what but it was required functionality in my mind). No problem.
They had a better ROM even and would send it to me for only another $25
(and I had to pay to return the old ROM for credit). Nope didn't work any
better either and I had to return the 2nd ROM. I only got credit for one
of the ROMs and this took me a month. I'm glad I didn't flash anything.

> Also, I haven't dealt directly with this problem in recent memory (so
> don't consider me authoritative at all), but from my previous experience
> what the BIOS sees is largely irrelevant.

This is only true once the kernel is loaded. You still have to load the
kernel, which brings you to the original problem of booting the disk,
which the BIOS does. If the disk is bigger than the BIOS can handle, the
POST will hang (at least it does on my machines). I tried partitioning a
disk so that the first partition was in the BIOS's size and still the POST
hung. You have to tell the BIOS that there is no disk and then you have
nothing to boot off (except the floppy).

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!