[Techtalk] FreeBSD on ancient Pentium BIOS upgrade question

[Robyn]

On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 23:46 -0500, Alvin Goats wrote:
> OK, deep dark black magic ....
> 
On the Seagate website at
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html you could try
Disk Manager v9.56a it lists it at the bottom of the page.

Hard Drive controllers originally talked to the drive sector by sector
but their was a size limitation in this. Next they called a group of
sectors a cluster and used cluster by cluster but their was a size
limitation in this. Then they used several clusters at a time and so on.
LBA stands for Logical Block Addressing a hard drive doesn't physically
have 256 heads like the specs on yours says.

Some of this fudgery Alvin is describing below, Disk Manager is a last
resort.

Robyn

> Some of the really old PC's had a limit of 8G and couldn't handle 
> anything larger. Your's may be one; however, all is not lost!
> 
> IF you have a CD that came with the HD, try booting the CDROM. I have a 
> 160G Seagate and working on making it work on some older PC's (not like 
> I haven't done this before...).  If you can do this:
> 
> Physically install the HD in your PC.
> Get into your BIOS and TURN OFF THE HD. DISABLE IT, TELL  YOUR PC IT 
> DOESN'T EXIST.
> Set your CD as the boot device in your BIOS.
> Put the CD in the CD drive.
> REBOOT.
> 
> The CD-ROM should load Caldera OpenDOS and other stuff to run the CDROM. 
> You will need to set the HD as a DOS compatable drive. Some of the old 
> BIOS's were set for MS-DOS, Windows or OS/2 and really don't understand 
> other OS's or larger drives than MS-DOS could handle.
> 
> The trick a lot of them have is a "Dynamic Overlay" that does some 
> remapping of the HD in a weird fashion that lets the older BIOS see the 
> drive. What you are trying to do is get a partition that is in the range 
> the BIOS can find whether it is 8G or more. The CDROM can install one of 
> these overlays so that it can use the majority of the drive.
> 
> When you partition, pick the first partition to be relatively small, 
> like 8G. This will be your boot partition so the BIOS can see it. Once 
> the OS starts up, it can see the rest of the drive and you can partition 
> it further.
> 
> ===============
> 
> Under Linux or BSD, boot the CD and get to the part where you can fdisk 
> or otherwise configure the disk. Set the disk to have DOS compatability, 
> that way the BIOS can find it and boot the small partition. Configure 
> all of the other partitions and set LILO, Grub or whatever boot manager 
> you have to use the MBR (Master Boot Record).
> 
> Do your software install and reboot. Whether the system can go live 
> straight from an install, reboot anyway. You need to see if the system 
> will boot up from being turned off.
> ============
> If you bought the HD as an OEM without any install CD's or floppies:
> 
> Physically install the HD in your PC.
> Get into your BIOS and TURN OFF THE HD. DISABLE IT, TELL  YOUR PC IT 
> DOESN'T EXIST.
> Set your CD as the boot device in your BIOS.
> Put the Linux or BSD CD in the CD drive.
> REBOOT.
> 
> Under Linux or BSD, boot the CD and get to the part where you can fdisk 
> or otherwise configure the disk. Set the disk to have DOS compatability, 
> that way the BIOS can find it and boot the small partition and set the 
> boot partition to 8G. Configure all of the other partitions and set 
> LILO, Grub or whatever boot manager you have to use the MBR (Master Boot 
> Record). Make sure the 8G boot partition is the active partition.
> 
> Do your software install and reboot. Whether the system can go live 
> straight from an install or not, reboot anyway. You need to see if the 
> system will boot up from being turned off.
> 
> When ALL of this is set and you reboot... go immediately into your BIOS 
> and enable the HD. It should be recognized by the BIOS now and can boot up.
> 
> Good Luck!
> 
> Alvin
> 
> Amanda Babcock Furrow wrote:
> >  
> > On Sat, Apr 08, 2006 at 01:49:27AM +0930, Robyn wrote:
> >
> >   
> >> What is the brand and model number of the hard drive?
> >>     
> >
> > Seagate ST3120814A.  And the BIOS is 08/21/97-580VPX-VIA83669-2A5LD000C-00,
> > which is Award BIOS v4.51PG for FYI (Full Yes Industries, a defunct Taiwanese
> > company), manufacturer of the VT 580VX MMX motherboard, which uses the VIA
> > VPX chipset, VIA 82C585.
> >
> > I'm definitely considering that PCI controller card someone posted about.
> > It's cheap enough to give it a shot :)
> >
> > Amanda
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> >   
> 
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