[BUGS] SATA and old BIOSes

[jonathan michaels]

On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 10:22:47AM +1100, Bernie Maier wrote:
> I was wondering whether if I got a SATA RAID PCI card to put into my old
> FreeBSD box, would I run into any problems with BIOS HDD size limitations
> or whether FreeBSD and/or the modern SATA card would just bypass the

trimmed .. becaue i'm not sure i can offer anything useful

firstly, i don't use those ide based thingies, i have been
using scsi from teh very begining and as long as i have an
isa/pci buss to plugin my scsi controllers and drives to use
... 

most of my hardware is old to say teh least, my youngest is 10
years old. i suppose my big disk/arrays is sort of the same as
your basic issues. all i have  to do is to remember to make the
root/boot 'partition' to live inside teh first 1024 cylinders.
so that teh bios boot routines can find teh boot stuff and bios
knows this to be in teh first 1024 cylinders and freebsd will
take care of teh rest, once teh pc is booted from its bios
encode place form its boot files on teh relevent disk
drive/partition/slice/place on media.   

from what i have seen of clients hardware the ide thingies work
much teh same way as the scsi system works .. once you can boot
off of teh array (the first 1024 cylinders) then leave teh rest
of teh array as a big partion for freebsd to take car off.

i always make two partitions (slices i think they are called)
one of pc dos so i can put on teh ms window de jour dos shell
to take care of hardware bios/config/diagnostics that
peripherals come with these days .. and then when i install
freebsd i make the fdisk bit to make teh rest (504 mb to
whatever gb is available in teh array) as one big freebsd slice
to be divided into however many fs i need to do tehrelevent
jobs/tasks/etc. 

hope this makes sence, is followable, not a good day .. grr.

most kind regards

jonathan

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