Cheap Linux Hardware - Maximum Hard Drive Size on older Motherboard ?

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Maximum Hard Drive Size on older Motherboard ?

John Rhome

2007-07-29, 1:16 pm

Hi. I have an old linux 2.4 box on an Abit BX6r2 (440BX) motherboard, PII-450,
UDMA/33. Can I buy a new 500GB or 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the full drive
even if the motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb (this is what I've
read)?

I've been web searching, and LBA-48 related comments come up, but I don't know
if this will be a limit or not. I can't find a definitive answer.

Thanks!

General Schvantzkoph

2007-07-29, 7:15 pm

On Sun, 29 Jul 2007 17:51:13 +0000, John Rhome wrote:

> Hi. I have an old linux 2.4 box on an Abit BX6r2 (440BX) motherboard,
> PII-450, UDMA/33. Can I buy a new 500GB or 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the
> full drive even if the motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb
> (this is what I've read)?
>
> I've been web searching, and LBA-48 related comments come up, but I
> don't know if this will be a limit or not. I can't find a definitive
> answer.
>
> Thanks!

Your fallback position is to put a Promise card into your machine. The
current generation of Promise cards all seem to be SATA-II so you'll need
to get an SATA-II disk rather than a PATA disk if you go that route
unless you can find an old Promise card somewhere.

Shadow_7

2007-07-29, 7:15 pm

> Hi. I have an old linux 2.4 box on an Abit BX6r2 (440BX) motherboard,
> PII-450, UDMA/33. Can I buy a new 500GB or 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the
> full drive even if the motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb
> (this is what I've read)?

You should be able to "use" a 500GB drive. BUT... you will need to have
several partitions. And may have to do some trickery to use partitions
other than the primary. Isn't it a 137GB limit? Which is imposed by the
motherboard specifically. If you don't want to have to deal with it,
than you should limit yourself to 120GB or smaller disks. Or just
upgrade your motherboard and/or computer(s). Something which is probably
cheaper to do than pay your phone bill these days.

Anton Ertl

2007-07-30, 7:15 am

"John Rhome" <rhome@nomail.us> writes:
>Hi. I have an old linux 2.4 box on an Abit BX6r2 (440BX) motherboard, PII-450,
>UDMA/33. Can I buy a new 500GB or 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the full drive
>even if the motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb (this is what I've
>read)?

I think so. You probably have to put the boot partition in the first
128GB or boot from a different (<128GB) disk, though.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

***** charles

2007-07-30, 1:16 pm

"John Rhome" <rhome@nomail.us> wrote in message
news:ls4ri.51098$Io4.751@edtnps89...
> Hi. I have an old linux 2.4 box on an Abit BX6r2 (440BX) motherboard,
PII-450,
> UDMA/33. Can I buy a new 500GB or 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the full drive
> even if the motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb (this is what
I've
> read)?
>
> I've been web searching, and LBA-48 related comments come up, but I don't
know
> if this will be a limit or not. I can't find a definitive answer.

There are many different hard drive size limitations depending on the
technology
being used:

512M
2.1G
8.4G
33G
137G
???

If you do get say a 750G which are running around $250 now also
get a PCI controller card with it, should add less than $40 and you
will be able to use the whole thing. Make sure the controller and
the card match P-IDE > P-IDE or SATA > SATA. With SATA,

HD controller HD disk Speed it will run
150 150 150
150 300 150
300 150 150
300 300 300

Current stuff that is available should all be 300 but you can mix
and match. The pci bus may be the limiting factor and newer
controller tend to be PCI-e or PCI-x but you should still be able
to find just the regular PCI SATA and P-IDE ones. There are
also differing PCI standards so make sure the controller card
matches with your particular PCI slots.

later.....

Vilmos Soti

2007-07-30, 7:16 pm

"John Rhome" <rhome@nomail.us> writes:

> Hi. I have an old linux 2.4 box on an Abit BX6r2 (440BX)
> motherboard, PII-450, UDMA/33. Can I buy a new 500GB or
> 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the full drive even if the
> motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb (this is
> what I've read)?

I had similar problems, but longer ago, with old Pentium
machines. I think the MB limitation was 8GB, but my disk
was much bigger. The MB, whenever tried to find the disk,
hanged. So I figured out the geometry of the disk (good
chance it is written on it), and simply reduced the cylinder
count, so the apparent disk size became less than 8GB. I
entered this info into the BIOS by hand. The BIOS was now
happy, and it booted the computer. I placed (IIRC) a small
partition at the beginning, /boot/, and then the rest was
everything else. Linux will recognize your disk.

Important, keep the head/sector count. Change (reduce) only
the cylinder count.

> I've been web searching, and LBA-48 related comments come up,
> but I don't know if this will be a limit or not.

Brrr. I didn't mess with the LBA. I simply lied to the BIOS
about the cylinder count, to keep it under its limit, and
the rest was handled by Linux.

Vilmos

Mark Hobley

2007-07-30, 7:16 pm

John Rhome <rhome@nomail.us> wrote:
> Can I buy a new 500GB or 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the full drive
> even if the motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb (this is what I've
> read)?

You probably need to flash the bios to support bigger drives, or install an IDE
controller card that supports big hard drives.

I had this issue on some of my machines. On one, I managed to find a hacked
bios, and upgraded the machine for large disk support. On another, I could not
find a bios image, so I installed an IDE controller card, and disabled the
onboard IDE controller support within the BIOS setup. The machine now
supports big drives.

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley
393 Quinton Road West
QUINTON
Birmingham
B32 1QE

Email: markhobley at hotpop dot donottypethisbit com

http://markhobley.yi.org/

Rikishi 42

2007-07-30, 7:16 pm

On 2007-07-29, John Rhome <rhome@nomail.us> wrote:

> Hi. I have an old linux 2.4 box on an Abit BX6r2 (440BX) motherboard, PII-450,
> UDMA/33. Can I buy a new 500GB or 750GB ATA-100 HD and use the full drive
> even if the motherboard bios is probably limited to 120 gb (this is what I've
> read)?
>
> I've been web searching, and LBA-48 related comments come up, but I don't know
> if this will be a limit or not. I can't find a definitive answer.

Only the boot drive's size is important.
If you use such a big drive as you first (only ?) drive, there are
solutions. But They're usually very messy.

I have a little old server, a P-II 350 MHz. It has a bios-limit too, 32 GB I
think. So what I did was:

Hardware
- put in a supported, smaller, drive as first HD (I used a 20 GB)
- put the bigger one, as second drive, tell bios there is no second drive

Bios
- set up first drive normally
- set second HD to 'none' (no drive present)

Linux install
- set / and swap on first HD
(plenty space, I copied my SUSE install DVD on it)
- set /home on large HD

The bios will find the first drive and boot correctly from it.
Linux will find both drives.

Good luck.

--
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
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