Re: How to use old CPUs (Not Debian Specific)
On Tuesday 18 October 2005 03:07, m@de-minimis.co.uk wrote:
> I have an old clunker that wouldn't take a big HDD so, being utterly
> penniless I with great trepitation flashed the bios. It's not all that
> hard and the box took an 80G hard drive no problem after that.
Even if it is an older machine and the bios update doesn't help, the
controller itself doesn't worry, just make sure you don't let the BIOS try to
detect the drive. All it means is you have to have a small disc to boot off
and the big disc as a slave.
I had a 486 that had an 80mb disc as master mounted as /boot, and a 40GB as
slave (only one IDE controller there). If you try to let the bios
autodetect, it hangs on the slave, but all you do is configure the drive with
only one drive plugged in, set the secondary to <NONE>, shut down, plug in
the big disc, power up and leave the BIOS alone. Linux will see the bigger
disc and use it just fine.
Speaking of older hardware, I had a "Super 7" board without a CPU. Found a
Pentium 133 chip, added 512MB RAM (PC100), added a TNT2 AGP card, SATA
controller and a 7200rpm disc. The board has got 1mb L3 cache too. Ended up
being a not half bad PC. It is doing mailserver/fileserver/gateway/firewall
duty for about 20 people....
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