[Techtalk] FreeBSD on ancient Pentium BIOS upgrade question

Alvin Goats agoats at compuserve.com
Sat Apr 8 14:46:15 EST 2006


OK, deep dark black magic ....

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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