This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
From: Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> Sender: svlug-admin@lists.svlug.org Precedence: bulk List-Help: <mailto:svlug-request@lists.svlug.org?subject=help> List-Post: <mailto:svlug@lists.svlug.org> List-Subscribe: <http://lists.svlug.org/mailman/listinfo/svlug>, <mailto:svlug-request@lists.svlug.org?subject=subscribe> List-Id: discussion list for the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group. <svlug.lists.svlug.org> List-Unsubscribe: <http://lists.svlug.org/mailman/listinfo/svlug>, <mailto:svlug-request@lists.svlug.org?subject=unsubscribe> List-Archive: <http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/> begin bill@billjonas.com (Bill Jonas) quotation: > I hope that Rick Moen won't mind me referring to his FAQ, but he has a > lot of information on the subject (geared more toward 486s than > Pentiums, but very useful nonetheless).... Not at all. I'm flattered, sir. begin dc000741@hotmail.com (David Cornwell) quotation: > I want to add a 30-40 gb disk. No SCSI, to expensive and it's not needed. > [...] Problem is I'm confused as to what I need? Your priorities are not my business, but perhaps you won't mind a brief moment of amusement that being so confused you can't proceed is perfectly OK as long as you're _saving money_. > Everything for sale is an ATA disk. The Gateway machine has EIDE from > 1996, I don't think ATA was around then. You might want to read my still-timely March 1996 article, "All about EIDE", at http://linuxmafia.com/pub/hardware/eide.txt . "EIDE" was just a marketing term for a particular package of ATA pseudo-standards, created and promoted by Western Digital in the early 1990s. "Fast ATA" was another such, promoted by Seagate's marketroids around the same time. For that matter, "IDE" is a slightly older, fluffy marketing term for systems built around ATA (AT Attachment) technology. The real underlying technology is most accurately referred to as "ATA"[1] -- which has had a raft of more-or-less compatible enhancements grafted onto it over the years. Still confused? OK, but at least you're saving money. ;-> > So does it mean that plunking in an ATA disk in is ok? You betcha. More or less. We'll get into that, below. > The guy at techsupport says I only need an adapter if I want to modify my > old BIOS, which will allow my Gateway to see the whole 30-40 GB disk. Is > this true? You could very well hit that 33.8 GB ATA-drive / old-BIOS limit that Bill Jonas (indirectly) referred to, in his link to the Large Disk HOWTO. As the HOWTO points out, you can jumper some ATA drives to lie to the BIOS, claiming to be smaller than they really are. You then presumably feed the _real_ drive size to the booting kernel via LILO "append" directives, or such. Or, as Bill says, use a smaller disk to boot from, such that your antique BIOS boot routine's (possible) inability to correctly deal with >33.8 GB ATA disks isn't an issue. > [The Gateway technical support guy] says that adding the ATA disk without > an ATA adaptor means I'll have to make lots of 2 GB partitions. Nope. He seems to have in mind the limitations of the old Microsoft FAT16 filesystem, whose maximum cluster size and number of entries in the FAT table jointly imposed a maximum partition size of 2 GB. Starting around MS-Windows98 and the MS-DOS v. 4.10.1998 version within it, Microsoft kludged around that limitation by introducing its FAT32 extensions -- a cure arguably worse than the disease. (It was even slower, more fragile, more fragmentation-prone, and more RAM-hungry. But it _did_ make possible constructing ludicrously large hard-drive partitions on a filesystem design that was ideally suited for 160 kB floppies two decades earlier.) There is a 2 GB per _file_ (filesize) limitation that is slowly being eradicated from the various 32-bit Linux ports (such as x86). See: http://www.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/varesearch/solution?11=000523-0003&130=0959067317 > In a nutshell, are there FAQs walking a new user through adding a hard > disk to an old machine? The Large Disk HOWTO is a pretty decent place to start -- though it's more about Linux than about hardware issues. On the latter, since you insist on using ATA, make sure you end up with _all_ drives on each ATA chain jumpered correctly (not just the drive you're adding). When there are two devices on a chain, one must be jumpered as master, the other as slave. A device sitting by itself on a chain should be jumpered to either master or "standalone" -- the latter being a third state that is sometimes present. Check your drive's docs. Also, if remotely possible, you should make sure that any ATA devices you want to be able to gain access to concurrently are on different chains: ATA controllers don't do the "disconnected mode" operation required for concurrent access to both devices of a chain.[2] > What should I get, EIDE, ATA, ATA adaptor or not? SCSI. ;-> Only since you asked. But you'd rather be confused, have bizarre failures and incompatibilities, and "save money", I'll warrant. [1] It, in turn, is just a warmed-over variation of the old ST-506 interface for MFM, with almost all electronics leaving barely more than buffer circuitry moved to the hard drive (thus the term "Integrated Drive Electronics"). The wire between that buffer and the hard drive electronics is what was then laughingly dubbed the "ATA bus". [2] Somebody recently claimed that Yet Another Bizarre ATA Extension somewhere can now support concurrent access in mumbledy-mumble circumstances. I neither know nor care about details. ===