I'm considering skipping the 8.4gig idea, and just getting one of the 30
gig drives - probably Western Digital as I've been happy with the performance
of their drives so far. A couple of problems however:

1. No apparent means of setting the BIOS of either one of my machines to
handle anything over 8 gig; and

2. Win NT, and probably DOS, can't see the extra space either.

   I know that a good distribution of Linux should be able to handle it. But
what about booting it up? Will just putting /boot at the beginning of the disk
suffice? What are typical cylinders/heads/tracks/etc settings for these
things?

   And do the new drives come with special drivers such as the ones that 1gig
drives first came bundled with in the days of the 540M limit? Does it work
any differently?

8 responses total.

Special drivers cannot be relied on to properly spoof all operating
systems.  Your best bet is to buy a $20 BIOS card from Promise Technology
or some such.  These are 8-bit ISA cards, which makes sense, if you think
before reacting, the one card can upgrade any Intel typical system to
handle large hard drives, and the 8-bit nature only slows down initial
start up.  Except for DOS, most Intel operating systems will use BIOS long
enough to load protected mode disk drivers, at which point the BIOS ceases
to be a factor in the drive speed.  The one circumstance where this can be
a major pain (other than full DOS) is when loading Windows 9X, as you have
to start from DOS (unless upgrading)  and the initial GUI is a skeletal
version of Windows 3.1, which relies on DOS, and thus the BIOS, once the
second install phase starts, that ceases to be an issue once the 9X GUI
starts.

This is the most reliable way I know of to upgrade systems for the newer
drives.  Don't flinch at the thought of putting an ISA card in your early
pentium, the performance hit during boot up is not really that bad.

Thank you. That sounds like an excellent idea! In fact, I'm still using ISA
cards in this machine: a Soundblaster 8 and a multi-IO card configured to be
COM1 and COM2 - perfectly good equipment. (Won't be viable for the new
motherboards that are devoid of ISA slots, but that's a moot point anyway I
think.)

You're downriver I think. Who sells 'em? I don't *remember* seeing them at
Best Buy, but I haven't been looking specifically for that item.

Oooh. One thing pointed out to me that I should ask. Do I need to turn on a
"shadow RAM" - consuming low memory or EMS in the process when using DOS -
in order to use one of these cards, that I might not be using with the
motherboard BIOS? What about just buying a new BIOS chip?

As far as I know, because these BIOS cards are meant to enable large disk
drives, they simply stick themselves at c800 and grab control the way an
old XT hard disk controller would, as the PC BIOS still looks for
supplemental BIOS signatures at several locations before allowing the
system to start up.  I have never needed to fiddle with shadow RAM or any
such to get one of these cards working.  In the downriver area, you can
get these things at Southgate Computer, just around the corner from the
Southgate Best Buy. On Eureka Road just east of Dix on the south side of
the road.  If you get to McDonalds, you've overshot.

Also, you can get these cards with on-board controllers that can be set to
tertiary or quadernary controller mode, if you need that many IDE devices.
Those cost a bit more.

The BIOS extension card is an interesting idea, I've not
seen the type you describe so it would probably not have
occurred to me.  Are the SCSI versions of these drives a
lot more expensive?  I wondered about the suitability of
adding a SCSI card (they're great, I love SCSI ;o) with
it's own BIOS extensions if necessary.  That way, drew
could add six more drives as and when he fealt like it!
Not only that, but there would probably be less of a
performance hit than with ATA (IDE).  What do you think?

I have a Scuzzy card (Adaptec 1542C) in the basement machine, on account of
somehow its built-in IDE capability is fried. For the main brain, however,
having both Scuzzy and IDE in the same machine seems a bit redundant.

I believe I have the BIOS issues worked out. The 20GB drive I ended up getting
is fully visible to Caldera irregardless of the BIOS. And all indications are
that Windoze NT would *still* not be able to see any more than 8.4 Gig. As
for DOS, *maybe* the BIOS card would help. Maybe not. For now I'm going to
ignore the issue, as I intend to eventually move things over to Linux anyway.

Oh yes, this drive turns out to be *very* fast. An NT installation gets done
in about 20 minutes or so.

A SCSI card that can boot the machine does have to leave a BIOS image
after the card initializes.  I have an Adaptec card that explicitly says
it is not leaving an image visible because there are no bootable devices
attached.  Once a Windows or Linux system gets going, the BIOS ceases to
be relevant.

One trick that I have heard of for Linux systems, but have never actually
tried, is to give the BIOS accurate figures for the rest of it, but to lie
about the number of cylinders to keep it within BIOS limits, and use a
/boot partition to get Linux started, once the protected mode drivers
load, the disk is interrogated and the returned values used by Linux to
get at the full disk size.  This sounds reasonable but I would like to
hear if anyone nearby has actually done it.

I did the /boot partition trick in one fo my Caldera incarnations. As for
the BIOS setting, I'm having it autodetect. It does report the full size of
the drive in the device list, though that's probably a string stored in the
hard drive's electronics.

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss