On Sun, 2003-10-12 at 19:26, Greg Meyer wrote: > On Sunday 12 October 2003 09:55 pm, Rob Blomquist wrote: > > Yesterday, I went out and innocently bought an 80Gb drive for a little > server > > I was planning on rebuilding. > > > > So I swapped the components from the P-166 into the AMD-K6/2-450 box > (FIC > > VIA-503+ mobo), connected up the drives, and booted into problems. > > > > Finally, I was able to have the BIOS detect it as a 8.4Gb disk, but no > bigger. > > The 3rd drive in this box is a 15Gb that is detected and runs great. > > > > I have been reading "Mark Minasi's 2003 PC Upgrade and Maintenence > Guide" and > > he talks about the addressing problems in the IDE/ATA BIOS space. Then > he > > goes on to talking about how autotranslation works to circumvent the > BIOS and > > allow bigger drives to run by the OS detecting the drive itself, and > handling > > the addressing without BIOS support . MInasi says that autotranslation > is > > part of some UNIXes. > > > > Basically, I am wondering if Linux supports autotranslation, as when I > was > > able to run this disk as 8.4 Gb, the kernel was able to report the > disk model > > number back during boot. I am now wondering if Linux supports > > autotranslation, so that if I set up the BIOS correctly, the drive > could be > > detected and run? > > > I believe the answer is yes, that the Linux kernel will be able to > address the entire drive. You can test this simply by trying it > though, I don't think you have anything to lose.
Shortcut... download Morphix (a mini knoppix) or the lnxBBC distro. put it on a CD and boot from it with the drive in the box. Then see what Linux sees as far as drive size etc goes. This way you know before you go. Second. Update the BIOS I'm using some ASUS K-7 mobo's here and the award bios update was worth it. James
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