[Techtalk] FreeBSD on ancient Pentium BIOS upgrade question

[Maria Pinjanainen]

On Thursday 06 April 2006 21:01, Amanda Babcock Furrow wrote:
> I have a FreeBSD machine running on a generic reseller's Pentium (no
> roman numerals after that) dating to 1998 or so.  (The motherboard "manual"
> (leaflet) is around here somewhere but not located at the moment.)  I
> needed more disk space (was on 3.2 GB) so I can ignore my email for 3-6
> months (baby coming!)  So I got a new 120GB disk.
>
> Guess which BIOS doesn't support it?  Apparently things bigger than 32
> GB are Right Out.  The drive even has a jumper setting to mimic 32 GB,
> but (ominously) this does not correct the BIOS hanging while trying to
> detect.
>
> The drive, chosen to be at least somewhat compatible with my old IDE
> controller, is a Seagate Ultra ATA/100.  The BIOS is Award v4.51 PG,
> 1997 copyright date.  I guess my first question is, anybody know how I
> can get the full BIOS info string?
>
> My next question - if I need a whole new BIOS, how can I safely upgrade
> it?  Is there any way to safely fall back to the old BIOS?  Right now it's
> a working machine, and I'm loathe to risk losing that.

Hi!
I have had same kind of problems. Ok, I run Linux, but belive this works in 
FreeBSD too.
Boot it with the os you have runnig there now and if you can find the new 
disk, you can use it. (If you can boot kernel, it finds the new hd.)
I have made so with old pentuims and amds. I have the bootable partition in CD 
or in a small hd what bios supports and I use, for example 120G hd for 
backups, courier-imap etc...

> I've never messed with a BIOS before.  We don't have a budget for a new
> computer.  I have three weeks and about $50 to resolve this situation.
>
> Thanks,
> Amanda
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