Date: Fri, 20 Oct 95 11:15:29 EDT From: bosch@meadow.mdso.vf.ge.com To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Western Digital Caviar 1.28Gig HDD? Message-ID: <9510201515.AA06090@opus.meadow.mdso.vf.ge.com>
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>Obviously, because of the old bios, he has to use "Ontrack Disk Manager" >to even get DOS running. He cannot seem to locate the BIOS chipset on >this particular No-name motherboard. > >The most logical choice would be to buy an EIDE board and hopefully, the >board's bios will take over. > >>To those of you who have ran into the bios' limit of 528Meg, what kind of >EIDE board(s) did you get? We would appreciate any insight that you may >share with us. I just ran into to this as well. However, I didn't use "Ontrack" although I have the exact same drive (Western Digital 1.28Gig Caviar). What I did was to make sure my DOS partition was a FreeBSD-root-partion-size less than the 1024 cylinder (~500 MB) limit (in my case I made this 32 MB less) so that when allocated, the root partition was within the 1024 cyclinder limit and, therefore, the boot manager could access and execute the kernel. With the kernel running, FreeBSD has no trouble accessing the rest of the disk even though the "raw" BIOS can't. By the way - I did it the hard way, I used fdisk to repartion disk to the new size and therefore lost my entire DOS partion - no suprise. (I did, however, first make backups). I found out later that there is a utility on the FreeBSD CDROM (or ftp site I assume) called "FIPS.EXE" that will allow you to adjust the size of a HD partition WITHOUT losing the data. I haven't tried it, however. Never the less, I would be interested to know how FreeBSD works with the "Ontrack Disk Manager". For instance, does it still require the root partition to be within the 1024 limit? #include <standard.disclaimer> ___ ___ ___ ___ Charles T. Bosch (bosch@meadow.mdso.vf.mmc.com) / /__//__//__// //__ Lockheed Martin Corporation /__ / // // \ /__ //___ Valley Forge, Pennsylvania USA ========================================================================== Reporter, n.: A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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