On October 9, 2005 02:45 pm, Dan Martin wrote this amazing epistle:
Mike Pfaiffer wrote:
On October 8, 2005 09:05 pm, Trevor Cordes wrote this amazing epistle:
On 4 Oct, Dan Martin wrote:
It turns out that my BIOS and ATA interface cannot handle HDs bigger than 137 GB, so I am switching my new larger drives to another computer and using its drives in the P3 - ie, lots of copying drives and partitions.
The easiest way to get big drives working on even ancient computers is get a PCI IDE card. Many options are available in the $40-$60 range and they almost all work with linux OOB. As for SATA, I've had nothing but grief with cheap SATA cards and would recommend staying away from them, esp if you're using FC which seems to be the worst for SATA.
The USB solution I mentioned a while ago works on fairly new machines. It may work on older machines as well (I haven't tried it yet). A friend running M$ said he tried a 200GB drive under ME and it would only see 137 GB as well. He ended up returning it for a 120. Later he got another 200 (internal this time) ME only saw the 137 GB like before, but Chris and I managed to get Linux installed on the rest of the drive. It worked until he had to reinstall ME. Since 137 GB seems to be common, there may be a possibility putting the big drive in a USB box (again around $40.00) could get around the limitation of the BIOS as long as it's not a M$ drive.
I have a 200 GB IDE drive in a USB box. The old machine sees it perfectly under Windows (and presumably under Linux). I am pretty sure that I cannot boot from it, so I got 2 WD 120GB internal drives that I am having some adventures with.
Booting depends on the BIOS. It'll have to be a newer one. For storage I find it great. If speed isn't essential it's a decent alternative. It doesn't involve taking the machine apart and the power source is external.
The USB will come in very handy, however. When I get the hang of the dd command and make sure that I'm not using it in such a way that I trash my systems, I will use it to ghost a copy of my laptop harddrive to a file on the USB HD.
Never used dd much. I got it to work half the time (my fault it didn't work the other half). If your laptop drive is only used for data (ie. you don't care about the image booting or you'd prefer a fresh OS each time) you can just use the cp command. I recall a few years back someone at one of the meetings was mentioning a ghost command for Linux.
Later Mike
Mike Pfaiffer wrote:
On October 9, 2005 02:45 pm, Dan Martin wrote this amazing epistle:
I have a 200 GB IDE drive in a USB box. The old machine sees it
perfectly under Windows (and presumably under Linux). I am pretty sure that I cannot boot from it, so I got 2 WD 120GB internal drives that I am having some adventures with.
Booting depends on the BIOS. It'll have to be a newer one. For storage I find it great. If speed isn't essential it's a decent alternative. It doesn't involve taking the machine apart and the power source is external.
The USB will come in very handy, however. When I get the hang of the dd command and make sure that I'm not using it in such a way that I trash my systems, I will use it to ghost a copy of my laptop harddrive to a file on the USB HD.
Never used dd much. I got it to work half the time (my fault it didn't work the other half). If your laptop drive is only used for data (ie. you don't care about the image booting or you'd prefer a fresh OS each time) you can just use the cp command.
That's the trick - keeping the OS, software, etc. For data, I copy to USB all the time. But I have no way of booting if something happens to the hard drive - hopefully by having a ghost of it I can pop in a new drive if it fails, and restore from the ghost via USB.
On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 09:27:53PM -0500, Dan Martin wrote:
That's the trick - keeping the OS, software, etc. For data, I copy to USB all the time. But I have no way of booting if something happens to the hard drive - hopefully by having a ghost of it I can pop in a new drive if it fails, and restore from the ghost via USB.
Mondo is quite a helpful tool for the system side of things. It creates a set of bootable CDs or DVDs, which are bootable and have the partitioning information stored as well. It isn't as handy as some programs for selective backups and restores, but can do a bare-metal restore from nothing but the backup disks themselves.
It has saved my bacon a couple of times now, once when bad RAM allowed my root filesystem to be corrupted beyond repair, and again when a drive died on the old PC I use as a Linux-based firewall. Being able to get back up without going through an entire reinstall-then-restore dance is quite a boon. In the case of the firewall box, I was back up after 1/2 hour, including small config changes to restore to an alternate drive.
Cheers, Tim
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Dan Martin -
Mike Pfaiffer -
Tim Lavoie