Re: Old BIOS, Large EIDE Drive and setmax program

From: Michael Perry (mperry_at_lnxpowered.org)
Date: 10/19/05 

Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 09:13:37 -0700

In article <43585a4d.178918000@news.iswest.com>, no.spam@gte.net says...
> I have an old motherboard for which I bought a Maxtor (6Y080P0) 80 gig
> EIDE hard drive. When I connected the drive to the motherboard, the
> system hung. I did some reading and found that the drive has a
> capacity limit jumper that causes the BIOS to see about 34 gig and
> that some old BIOSes will do this hanging thing. I'd really like to
> use the whole drive. More reading turned up a program called 'setmax'
> which can (and does) soft enable the full size of the drive even with
> the capacity limit jumper installed. What I couldn't find is exactly
> how I can use this program in a boot script. One response in a forum
> said to use it in /etc/rc.sysinit and his comment was he put it "at
> the top", though didn't specify exactly where. I tried that, putting
> it just after the banner code and before fsck is run and doing that
> really screwed things up. I restored the system's function by moving
> the drive to another server, mounting it and removing the call to
> setmax for now.
>
>

I've dealt with things like this before on older systems. On one
system, a Compaq Pentium 166, I wanted to hook up a 200g drive that
would be a samba share basically for me. The drive could not be seen by
the bios but Linux itself dealt with the drive without some additional
utility. So what I did was add a small drive that the bios could see up
front on /dev/hda1 like perhaps a 10 or 20 or something gig drive.
Basically a drive that is a known good thing for the bios. Then I added
the second drive and told the bios to ignore that drive. The system
booted on the /dev/hda that the bios supported with no problems and
ignored the second drive. Instead of using a bundled disk management
program, I just used linux since it takes over from the bios effectively
and will see that second drive with no problems. I fdisk'ed the second
drive (/dev/hdb) while in Linux and added the shares I wanted to use.
Linux itself saw the whole drive and did not need a secondary utility
program to run. Then I just added the drive to /etc/fstab, created
shares for samba there, and was done.

If you just use Linux, you won't have to worry about how to launch some
utility from an init script. This would depend on you having an
acceptable drive at /dev/hda to use as the so-called "boot drive" and
turning off or having the older system's bios ignore the second drive. 

-- 
Michael Perry | Do or do not. There is no try --Master Yoda
mperry@lnxpowered.org | http://www.lnxpowered.org

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