backup & low downtime for home network

[Jamon Camisso]

On December 6, 2007 01:09:42 pm Brandon Sandrowicz wrote:
> On 12/6/07, Chris Aitken <chris-n/jUll39koHNgV/OU4+dkA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > Okay, I set Master and Slave on each IDE cable. I'm starting up the
> > computer now (I'm installing ubuntu 7.10). The first thing I see
> > is,
> >
> > The folowing configuration options were automatically updated:
> >
> > Disk: 137438MB   WDC WD1600AAJB-00PVA0
> > CD-ROM: CDD-1480
> >
> > The problem is that the salesman told me these are 160 GB drives. I
> > just spoke with a guy at the local Krazy Krazy - he says that the
> > "DOS on the motherboard" uses the missing 22 GB. Is that true? I
> > didn't know CMOS settings were DOS. And I'm surprised it needs 22
> > GB of hard disk space. That's bigger thatn the biggest hard drive
> > I've ever owned (which was 20 GB until now).
> >
> > Also, I'm surprised that the second hard drive (Master on the other
> > IDE cable) wasn't detected - or maybe that is going to be on the
> > next POST output message...
> >
> > Chris
> >
> > <snip>
> > --
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>
> 137GB is a limit of some old motherboards.  The IDE controller can't
> address more space than that.  If you get a PCI IDE controller, you
> can have one with a newer IDE controller that can address all of that
> space.
>
> That sales person is talking through their ass.  BIOS != DOS, and
> nothing is "using" that extra space.  What would a BIOS need 22GB for
> anyways?  Just to put that in prespective, a DVDRip of tv series
> season (~24 episodes) would be around 8GB....

That and hard drive manufacturers have long measured sizes in decimal 
representations of bytes instead of using base2 respresentations. Where 
1024^3 is 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 1gb like we're used to in terms of 
file sizes, ram, etc., hdd manufacturers measure 1gb as 10^9 or 
1,000,000,000 bytes.

So your 160gb drive in decimal works out to a maximum of 149.01gb. 
Brandon's point about your ide controller is a good one, is there a 
tool from WD to bypass your bios limitations? I had to use one of those 
with a first generation 40gb Seagate drive I had that would only show 
up as 32gb.

Jamon
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