Hi all,
I have a PII 350MHz running on a P2B motherboard. Linux runs just fine on this "old" machine : so I'd like to buy a new disk, like a Maxtor 80 Gb IDE disk.
My local reseller told me that it may be possible that the bios is tooooo old to recognize such a big disk (i have revision 1006). On ASUS website the latest bios is 1012, but i can't find out if it addresses the >32 Gb issue.
With Google i have found this

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hard..._20106821.html

that sounds good to be.
Anyone has a good advice for me

Thanks
Luigi

Most likely it has the problem, but just can't boot to a 32+ partition. I've got an old K6-3 with and 80 and 60 in it, booting to the 80 just fine. Regardless, you probably want to grab an ATA100 PCI card to at least get better then the ATA33 that's probably the max on the IDE controller on the board. A good test is if the board came with 48-pin IDE cables or 80-pin IDE cables. $15 more, but ATA100 you'll notice, especially if your LAN is 100BaseT.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi Finegan,
thank you for the reply: why did you say "just can't boot to a 32+ partition" and later "booting to the 80 just fine" ??
Sorry, but perhaps I'm missing the point....
Anyway, i don't want to make an 80 gb partion, but some smaller ones (system, swap, users, data1, data2, ...) so i suppose that every partition will be smaller than 32 Gb. Is it a kernel problem or a bios one?

Thanks
Luigi

I shouldn't have put partition, I should have written drive... yes, most likely that machine's bios is either going to get totally confused on that drive's size and either A) not notice it at all, or b) underreport it as 32Gb... But the easiest way to get around this is usually to just make the primary boot device a smaller drive, or, put the drive on an ATA riser card so its no longer the board bios that matters, but the ATA card's.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi Finegan,
let's say that I found a BIOS that sees the full 80Gb disk (it seems to me that ASUS added support for >32 GB disk in bios revision 1011, now i have 1012): should everything work fine?

Moreover: is a ATA133 disk pluggable in a ATA33 motherboard? If yes, this evening i will buy the disk (and tell you the tale....) and, maybe later, I will go for a PCI<->ATA controller.

Regards
Luigi

As long as the BIOS is a rev built for that board, heck yeah, flash it!

Oh yeah, an ATA133 controller, whatever, the other ATA controller doesn't matter, all that does is that the board is at least PCI 2.1 compliant, which the latter half of the Pentium 1 boards were, so you've got no worries.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi all,
IT WORKS!!!
Yesterday I bought the 80Gb ATA133 disk and plug into my P2B.
From the official ASUS support i got this email:

>Dear Customer,
> Thanks for choosing ASUS tek.
>
> With the latest BIOS, BX and ZX series motherboards can support HDD
>larger than 65GB but less than 127GB. You can download the
>BIOS from:
>http://www.asus.com.tw/support/downl...03.zip~zaqwedc
>
>Best Regards,
>ASUS Customer Service Center Shanghai

So I downloaded it, flashed, and now everything works: Linux (redhat 7.1) properly sees the whole disk, and fdisk, mke2fs, ..... work fine.

Thank you the the help given
Luigi

Brilliant, wow... go Asus! Usually they're much less awesome then that.

Cheers,

Finegan