Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2003 19:28:56 +0100 From: Chris Howells <howells@kde.org> To: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Large hard disk support in FreeBSD Message-ID: <200307291928.56949.howells@kde.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1030728200340.70790A-100000@fledge.watson.org> References: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1030728200340.70790A-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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=2D----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Robert, On Tuesday 29 July 2003 01:10, Robert Watson wrote: > Up until relatively recently, my main personal web service box was a > Gateway 2000 P120 from '95 running FreeBSD 4.x, so I can speak to this > with some confidence :-). There are a few things you need to look at: Many thanks for the answer, very informative. Has given me some confidence= =20 anyway :) Before I was hearing conflicting arguments some people claiming=20 that the OS wouldn't be able to detect the disk if it was disabled in the=20 BIOS, and others claiming that disabling it in the BIOS was the right thing= =20 to do. > (1) BIOS revision. Make sure you've flashed your BIOS forward as far as > possible -- some older Gateway 2000 BIOS's will hang if they see a > driver larger than they think is possible (I'm sure there's a better > technical definition, but the result is clear regardless :-). Good point. Unfortunately Gateway's support seems to have gone completely=20 AWOL, Gateway UK no longer offer any form of support and downloads, and the= =20 US Gateway site won't accept the machine's serial number so I'm not exactly= =20 sure what BIOS I have to download... well I downloaded one which seemed to = be=20 for an identical motherboard from the descriptions on the site but=20 unfortunately I couldn't get it to flash... will have another mess around=20 with that if I get problems. > (2) Do you want to boot from the drive? If I might suggest--don't even > try. Boot from a drive known to work fine with the BIOS. As you > suggest above, leave the drive unprobed (disabled) in the CMOS > configuration, which will help prevent the BIOS from tripping over it. > this will mean you can't use the drive in the loader before the kernel > is loaded, but since FreeBSD's device probing and management is pretty > much independent of the BIOS, it should work fine with FreeBSD. OK, that sounds great. The machine has a 2 gig disk already which will rema= in=20 the boot drive, the 80GB is going to be used for music/photos and stuff as= =20 I've managed to fill the 40GB in my laptop already :) > (3) The ATA controller built into your motherboard may not support larger > disk addressing, although I think that shouldn't be a problem with > 60GB. If you try to use a drive larger than addressable using the ATA > controller, you may want to pick up a cheap PCI ATA controller (or get > the "kit" version of the drive that has a new controller). Right, sounds like a good idea. Maybe a good idea anyway from a performance= =20 point of view since the board will support only UDMA 33 (is that the name f= or=20 it?) whereas the new drive is meant to support UDMA 100. Hopefully the P150= =20 processor can keep up :) > (4) Cabling and support for non-PIO. I found that my older motherboard's > ATA controller had problems negotiating higher rate transfers from the > disk, so ended up disabling the DMA support for at least one of the > drives I added. You will probably also want to make sure you're using > the newer cable that will come with any recent drive, since that will > help avoid quality and negotiation problems. You might end up needing > to force PIO support anyway if you're getting occasional timeouts from > the drive. =46ine. > That said, I ran just fine for about 8 years on my p120 -- I didn't want > to take it out of service, but I needed more memory than the chipset could > comfortably support. Some of those systems can only cache the first 64MB > of memory, so any additional memory is used uncached. I ended up > upgrading it to an E-Machine, go figure :-). The old p120 is now back at > home from colocation, and I'm sure I'll find a use for it at some point. Nice. I'm running Squid, Samba, Pure FTPD, cups, bind, dhcpd, nfsd and ntpd= =20 and FreeBSD seems to be doing a very nice job :)=20 =2D --=20 Cheers, Chris Howells -- chris@chrishowells.co.uk, howells@kde.org Web: http://chrishowells.co.uk, PGP ID: 0x33795A2C KDE/Qt/C++/PHP Developer: http://www.kde.org =2D----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/JrzoF8Iu1zN5WiwRAq+9AKCQISpn+KoWm6D9qT8EIjYvsgT98wCeObJo OoF9PIMj2qCucI0+efZqqKU=3D =3DPgTl =2D----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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