[wellylug] New HDD on old motherboard

[Brent Wood]

> 
> If Linux is on another disk in the system, try telling the BIOS nothing
> about the drive. You might need to ensure it's the only drive on whatever
> IDE chain you put it on, but Linux should find it anyway.
> 
> Common trick. I had to do it a lot for my first 200G spindles, before I
> upgraded a motherboard to one that supported LBA48.


But you can't boot off a such a disk, and I've often found that without BIOS
support for the drive, (to enable the motherboard to correctly identify & set
up the disk/ide controller), Linux can sometimes "see" it & use it, but it can
seldom set up UDMA & SMART diagnostics etc, correctly. 

The goal was to get DMA enabled under Linux & this is often problematic unless
the BIOS works nicely with the drive.

Personally, I've found the hours it can take to resolve such things generally
worth far more than the $200 odd for a brand new motherboard/cpu to avoid the
problem in the first place, & you get a much faster & generally more reliable
system anyway. eg: GA-7VM400M-RZ with a Sempron 2200, not blindingly fast by
modern standards, but a very cost effective upgrade. Comparable packages with
other boards are pretty easy to find... or even things like used Duron 1200
cpu/boards for < $100 via Trade Me, etc...

In my case, at least, it is long past trying to make components work together
being "fun" or even a challenging or interesting learning experience :-( If
hardware doesn't wanna work together, find something that does.

If you finally get everything working, you'll decide to upgrade anyway :-)

A bit like trying to get WinXP working reliably. Upgrading to Linux is much
easier :-) 

Or am I just having an end of year bout of the can't be bothered's ? 


Cheers

   Brent