No, it is not just a matter of having SP1. Some BIOS simply cannot handle it. You need to check the BIOS brand and the BIOS revision, then flash to the latest version available. If it is a new board, it should be safe, but at our office we had to flash a couple of BIOS last year to put on some 250 GB drives.
What board and BIOS brand/rev have you got? We can help you look.
It would let us know if the motherboard chipset supports 40-bit LBA. If it came with that PII, odds are its a 440LX, 440GX, or 440BX. If you've got one of those chipsets, you won't be able to use large drives on the integrated IDE (though why you'd want to is beyond me, since it maxes out with ATA33), but if you add a PCI ATA100 controller you'll be all set. New, retail-boxed Western Digital drives larger than 120GB come with one.
You can get a PCI controller card from Promise or HighPoint and plug the drive into it.
If your bios has an option to boot from a SCSI device set it to that and if not it still should boot from it although I offer no guarantees on that.
IAA requires 800-series chipsets to work. It won't work with the 440xx (I know because I tried.)
The Western Digital drives I mentioned came with Promise controllers. Note that those were the _retail_ boxed drives and not the OEM drives Newegg sells.
thats sucks cause i just got a good deal on a maxtor 200GB drive retail and it doesnt have one well i guess i have to get a card but i need one for linux
I've had mixed luck with Promise, but this one has worked out very well for me. As drasnor mentioned, it came with my 160GB WD.
0
Straight_ManGeeky, in my own wayNaples, FLIcrontian
edited March 2004
Um, Linux cannot find the HD??? Yeah, card would help there as its BIOS will recognize newer HDs. BUT, if Linux can find the HD, there are two things you can do. First, drive size and part size limits in Linux are determined by two things:
One, the kernle used. And Enterprise kernel can handle 80 GB plus partitions. Second, ReiserFS file sytem can handle TERRABYTE size volumes, and volume can be in theory ONE physical drive.
The REAL problem though will be speed. With a PCI card, drive will be found and usable, but two things will happen unless you use a SCSI setup:
First, I\O will be at 33 MHz, from card to rest of motherboard. Second, on aslower and older box, you will lose the secondary IDE channel on main IDE and have to literally disable it for card to work at all on that gen box. Anything on secondary IDE will get moved to and connected to your card.
An IDE drive will not get much in the way of throughput benchmarks with its throughput crimped through PCI bus to UDMA3 rates (as linux talks about it, as Windows sees it we are talking MDMA 33 rates or Ultra DMA 33 speeds). Diorect connect to IDE would be UDMA4 probably on that gen box, MDMA66 rate). What you gain in bigger drive would be almost totally lost in ineffective throughput, bottlenecked at PCI bus.
Third thing that will happen is increased power draw from drive and card BIOS. How big is the PSU you have in the box??? Figure not a 200W PSU anymore, try a 300W PSU.
Advice: Linux will have LOTS of ROOM with an 80 GB HD, it is hypermodular and swaps very little. Swap of a GIG is too much probably. And you will find EXT3 can handle what you need for volume size for an 80 GB drive since linus likes many parts as well as one partition. My /HOME partition is 20 GB on my linux drives. MY /opt part is 6 GB, my / is 15 GB, and the boot is about half a gig. I have almost 40 GB to play with for a FAT32 part for Windows downloads gotten via Linux, and for backups that can be read from any O\S almost (Yes, you can easily stick a FAT32 part (should be LAST logical part on physical drive if you want Windows tools for part copying to work without foobarring things) on a drive with Linux, and moreover you can read from it in Windows also for a multiboot, I would just not BOOT both O\S's from same drive due to the way the parts are numbered different between Linux and Widnows and Windows tools versus Linux tools, and the way Linux boundaries parts, but you can recover data this way quite easily).
Comments
What board and BIOS brand/rev have you got? We can help you look.
Dexter...
-drasnor
-drasnor
it works on alot of intel systems...
Gobbles
the LX did not support the 100 FSB of the 350P2
If your bios has an option to boot from a SCSI device set it to that and if not it still should boot from it although I offer no guarantees on that.
The Western Digital drives I mentioned came with Promise controllers. Note that those were the _retail_ boxed drives and not the OEM drives Newegg sells.
-drasnor
One, the kernle used. And Enterprise kernel can handle 80 GB plus partitions. Second, ReiserFS file sytem can handle TERRABYTE size volumes, and volume can be in theory ONE physical drive.
The REAL problem though will be speed. With a PCI card, drive will be found and usable, but two things will happen unless you use a SCSI setup:
First, I\O will be at 33 MHz, from card to rest of motherboard. Second, on aslower and older box, you will lose the secondary IDE channel on main IDE and have to literally disable it for card to work at all on that gen box. Anything on secondary IDE will get moved to and connected to your card.
An IDE drive will not get much in the way of throughput benchmarks with its throughput crimped through PCI bus to UDMA3 rates (as linux talks about it, as Windows sees it we are talking MDMA 33 rates or Ultra DMA 33 speeds). Diorect connect to IDE would be UDMA4 probably on that gen box, MDMA66 rate). What you gain in bigger drive would be almost totally lost in ineffective throughput, bottlenecked at PCI bus.
Third thing that will happen is increased power draw from drive and card BIOS. How big is the PSU you have in the box??? Figure not a 200W PSU anymore, try a 300W PSU.
Advice: Linux will have LOTS of ROOM with an 80 GB HD, it is hypermodular and swaps very little. Swap of a GIG is too much probably. And you will find EXT3 can handle what you need for volume size for an 80 GB drive since linus likes many parts as well as one partition. My /HOME partition is 20 GB on my linux drives. MY /opt part is 6 GB, my / is 15 GB, and the boot is about half a gig. I have almost 40 GB to play with for a FAT32 part for Windows downloads gotten via Linux, and for backups that can be read from any O\S almost (Yes, you can easily stick a FAT32 part (should be LAST logical part on physical drive if you want Windows tools for part copying to work without foobarring things) on a drive with Linux, and moreover you can read from it in Windows also for a multiboot, I would just not BOOT both O\S's from same drive due to the way the parts are numbered different between Linux and Widnows and Windows tools versus Linux tools, and the way Linux boundaries parts, but you can recover data this way quite easily).
John D.