This is technically not a Linux question; it's a hardware question, but
solving it is imperative if I am going to reinstall RH in a dual boot system
after having to do a strip down/upgrade of the system.
I have a FIC VA-503+, an AMD K6/2-500, 64MB 100MHz SDRAM, a Maxtor 13G
UDMA-33 HD, an IO Magic 44X UDMA-33 CDROM, and a HIVAL 2x2x24 CD-RW with a
PIO Mode 4 IDE interface. The rest of the system isn't germaine to the
discussion, I think, except for something I'm getting to.
So far, so good... I can have a dual boot Win98SE (for games and a few other
key apps... I like Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate, etc.) and RH 6.2, no problem.
However, 13 Gig is SO small in today's market..... so I decided to replace
a Maxtor 6.4 Gig drive that was giving me problems anyway (I had a hardware
problem last year that caused an overvoltage in the system... the only
survivor pieces still in use are the sound card, modem, floppy drive, and
the 6.4... but the 6.4 is now a bit unstable.)
I purchased (at a KILLER price!) a brand new WD 45Gig UDMA-66 HD. Notice,
this is above the 32 GB size that made up the last "barrier" in the IDE
interface. I installed it, as my primary master, used the UDMA-66 ribbon,
and told it to go to UDMA-33 mode (my MB is only good to UDMA-33). I set
the Bios so that the drive was properly identified with # of heads,
cylinders, sectors, etc. It even identified the size correctly when I
did... and NADA. The system never leaves the POST page. It FINISHES the
page, but never starts to boot the system. Ultimately, the only method I've
found for booting the system was to have the Primary Master set as NONE, and
have it boot off the 13 GB drive (the Primary Slave). In order to USE the
new drive, I had to install WD's EZ-Bios... which is (as near as I can
tell!) incompatible with Linux. Not good, though I'm able and willing to
uninstall it (eager too, as it dropped my performance by ~5-7%) if someone
can show me how to get the BIOS to handle it natively.
The BIOS date is 6/9/99. There are indeed newer versions of that BIOS
available and the REV for the MB is 1.2C. Does anyone out there have
experience with getting VIA-MP3 chipsets working with these larger drives in
Linux and Windows? I need both for what I want to do. Do the newer BIOSes
fix the problems with the 32GB limit? Is there anyone who has gone through
this already (horror stories, success stories, failure stories)? Would
purchasing a Promise UDMA-66 controller fix my problem? My wife has agreed
in principle to me having one (for more devices in the machine in question,
as well as giving her an excuse to get bigger drives in her machine and
pawning the smaller drives to me), but not until next year sometime... if
that's the ONLY solution, I'll try it (but doesn't the Promise controller
have issues with 6.2??? I thought I saw that in here... and I don't want to
have to go back to 6.1...)
Thanks in advance!
Bill Ward
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