[wellylug] New HDD on old motherboard

David Antliff dave.antliff at paradise.net.nz
Mon Dec 6 11:31:04 NZDT 2004


On Sun, 5 Dec 2004, Brent Wood wrote:
> 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.

Really? My understanding is that Linux doesn't even care what the BIOS 
says about a disk - it does it's own probing. Hence, with the jumper set 
to 32GiB and auto-geometry resizing enabled, the BIOS can see the disk, 
the bootloader can find the kernel, the kernel determines the correct 
geometry, and then the kernel can find the root filesystem and bring up 
the system, including DMA drivers. Does Linux *really* need the BIOS to 
detect a HDD before the kernel can program/enable a southbridge or IDE 
chipset? That's a function of the motherboard (which shipped with the 
BIOS) and not the disk. You should be able to enable this in the BIOS 
configuration regardless of whether a disk is actually present, surely? 
And is that even necessary?

Of course, if you can't get the BIOS to see the disk by setting the 
32GiB jumper or some other method, then you won't get the bootloader 
going. That's usually a good time to boot from a floppy or CDROM.

-- 
David.




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