[TriLUG] IDE Hard disk limitations BIOS and Linux

[Jason Tower]

you can add a pci ide controller card that supports ata/66, that'll get 
you around this issue easily, especially if you're booting off a scsi 
disk.  i have several if you want to try one.

jason

On Monday 20 December 2004 17:01, Rick DeNatale wrote:
> A few days ago I asked for Hard disk recommendations to add some
> large hard disk(s) to my old IBM Intelistation M 6889.
>
> After trying to research IDE hard disks, I've gotten more and more
> confused about the the size limits for IDE drives.
>
> I'm not sure how old this machine is, but it seems to have the latest
> BIOS available which is dated May 12, 2000 (or at least that's what
> the download page says, I haven't yet re-booted, gotta keep uptime
> going!).  This machine has both SCSI and IDE interfaces. It's got two
> 9GB SCSI drives in it now but the only IDE devices are a CD/ROM and a
> DVD Writer.
>
> So how do I figure out how big an IDE drive I can add to this
> machine, before I spend my money?
>
> How do I verify what the BIOS supports?  The Tech Ref says that it
> supports LBA for drives bigger than 528 MB, which seems to imply that
> it might well be limited to 120GB or less.
>
> Do I even need to worry about this. If I'm only running Linux I
> understand that the kernel doesn't even use the BIOS is this right? I
> figure that I'm going to keep the SCSI drives, and one of them will
> still be the boot device.