Second hard drive: Part 2

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 02:52:56PM -0400, Phillip Mills wrote:
> I'm still trying to get enough information to feel comfortable about 
> sticking a second hard drive in my PC with some hope of it working.
> 
> The machine is a Dell XPS B733: Pentium 3, about 3 or 4 years old.  I 
> went shopping yesterday and the first person I talked to who sounded 
> knowledgeable said that a current 40GB drive would *probably* work, but 
> larger ones might not be recognized by the IDE controller.  My user 
> manual says the Dell uses ATA-33 (which I assume matches the 33Mhz PCI 
> bus speed), while current drives all refer to ATA-133.  The 
> salesperson's not-very-reassuring comment was that the 133 drives 
> should be backward compatible to 100...and then I started wondering 
> whether he was talking about RAM speeds instead.
> 
> So, as usual, the more I think about PC hardware, the more confused I 
> become.  I used to run Linux on one of my Macs and I'm having trouble 
> remembering why I switched.  Oh, ya...someone gave me a free Intel box! 
>  :-)
> 
> Anyone willing to share some relevant facts?

Some changes to the ATA spec happend at the 32GB limit, and some older
bioses have trouble with drives larger than that.  Dell was notorious
for having hte problem up until they actually started shipping drives
over 32GB with the machines.

Now there are a few ways to solve the problem:

You can get an add on pci ide controller like a promise ata66, 100 or
133 card, and connect the drive to it, since it has it's own bios and
doesn't confuse the system bios by the drive size.

You can 'clip' the drive, using a utility that should be available from
the drive manufacturer, which makes the drive 'pretend' to only be 32GB,
allowing the system to boot, after which a utility or driver in the OS
can discover the fact the drive is clipped and work around it.  This
does give a boot limit of 32GB, similar to the old 8GB limit, the 2GB
limit, the 512MB limit, etc.  Linux kernels have supported the cliping
option for some time now.

Hope that helps.

Drives over 137GB of course must use an ata133 controller with LBA48bit
addressing.

Lennart Sorensen
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