Old PC, New Hard Drive
Forum: HD Install
Topic: Old PC, New Hard Drive
started by: Rapidweather
Posted by Rapidweather on Feb. 15 2004,15:39
I'm working with an old dual pentium pro pc that has the Awardbios v4.51pg, and I can't seem to get it to recognize hard drives
larger than about 500 mb or so. Of course, I did quickly get DSL
to run on it right away, since it has a 50x cdrom drive. After a while,
I partitioned the small drive, and boot from a DSL boot floppy, which
finds my /knoppix partition, and then I restore from another small partition, where I have my backup.tar.gz and my filetool.lst
All that is on a slave hdd, about 500 mb.
I used Maxblast once, and found that when installing a big hard drive, partitioned with tomsrtbt, or with DSL, when you reboot,
Maxblast overwrites the partition table, and all is lost, unless you
have written the table down.
This machine's bios needs upgrading, etc.
Anyone have any ideas? Although I don't need anything bigger
than 500 mb for the Slave Drive, for DSL,
I'd like to have a larger, master hard drive for windows, or perhaps another linux distro. Originally, this pc used a 6 GB drive
with OnTrack, but with only Windows, and I don't have that drive anymore.
Posted by hasty on Feb. 15 2004,18:34
Always hated those maxblast/on track drivers. You never had them when things went pear shaped.Flashing your bios is your best option.
Scary but I've done it several times now without problems.
Have also fried Athlons but thats another story................
Posted by Rapidweather on Feb. 16 2004,23:31
Oh, I've flashed a bunch of them, all with success. I tried several on this one, but finally gave up.What I have done, is boot slave hard drives off the little primary master on the first IDE channel, using ms-dos batch files, and loadlin. I have a big setup like that, with all the Linux distros I could come up with, and have a bunch of icons on the Windows desktop, one for each distro. So, if I click on SuSE, then Windows 98 closes, and SuSE boots. All I have to do is put the kernel for each in a directory with loadlin, and I'm good to go.
Damn Small needs very little space, so I have /knoppix in with the Windows partition, and filetool.sh also. Then I have a little 30 mb partition for the backup.tar.gz, and filetool.lst.
If I don't get the filetool.sh right (it points to the little 30 mb backup partition), then I have to boot off the DSL cd, and go in and fix it. The Scite editor is way better than trying to get things fixed (edited) with tomsrtbt or bootE linux on floppies.
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Great fun all around. Windows 98 usually is the hardest to work with, since if you change the cards around in the slots, etc, then the registry gets out of kilter.
I just run thru another install, and Windows 98 comes right back up, with my desktop, applications and all, and the registry is correct. I notice that DSL "autoconfigures devices" on bootup, so it's not only Small, but Tough. Almost makes Windows obsolete.
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