Re: maximum hard drive limitations?
On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 12:13:16AM +1100, Drew Parsons wrote:
>
> >From what you've been saying, it looks like I can be reasonably confident a
> larger drive will work without too much trouble, even if I have to install
> one of those BIOS-enhancing programs for it.
>
> I'll post a follow-up message once I've got the chance to test and install one
> of the larger drives.
>
And here's my follow up: I finally got the new hard-drive, and it's working
just great. I settled for 20GB, and Linux recognises it no-questions-asked.
I checked before purchasing by plugging the drive in place (easy to do once
you know where to look*) and running potato install disks - the partitioning
step, running cfdisk, found all 20 GB.
As far as the BIOS goes, there may or may not be issues putting the boot
sector higher than 8GB. I'm quite happy to leave the boot partition down
low, so this (possibly non-existing) problem doesn't bother me.
I got an IBM TravelStore drive. It's actually a wee bit smaller than the
original 3.8GB drive, and runs faster.
This is on a Toshiba 490CDT, with latest BIOS 8.0. Both Debian potato (kernel
2.2.17) (installed for a few minutes till I upgraded to Debian unstable - I
skipped woody) and Debian unstable (kernel 2.4.2) saw the drive with no
complaints.
So there you have it. The Toshiba docs (and official support) are ignorant.
The older models can handle larger drives just fine (taking note that the
8.0 BIOS is new, only came out last year some time. I don't know how it
would have gone with the original 7.2 BIOS).
Drew
* the drive was at the front under the mouse buttons, in case you were
wondering (it took me a while to find it...)
--
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