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Journal jawtheshark's Journal: Ask Slashdot: Harddisk size woes 21

Journal by jawtheshark
My brother managed to fill up the 40Gig Harddisk in baloo (family computer). So a few days ago I saw a Maxtor 160GB disk with 8Meg Cache for not too much money. Today I installed the thing in the machine, used Ghost to transfer all partitions and had it up and running in no time (okay, a couple hours). I was a bit surprised to see it only detected 137GB, but I just though: those bastard harddisk companies, counting 1000 for M instead of 1024. Not thinking futher that the difference was kinda big anyway.

I did read in the booklet that Windows 2000 SP2 (what I was running) didn't support disks beyond 137GB. Still no alarm bells ringing in my head, and I upgrade to SP4 (and all other machines in the home too, just to stay at the same level), run WindowsUpdate to patch them. (This is all not really needed, my users use Firefox/Eudora and are behind an OpenBSD firewall).

Then I think by myself: my akela's harddisk is only a 30GB 5400RPM and now I have this 40GB 7200RPM that I could install. It should work out positively on the performance (it only being a AMD K6-2 333Mhz). So I start to do the same but the 40GB disk doesn't detect. Strange... Then it strucks me: BIOS! The last BIOS for the Asus P5A is in version 1007, and no new ones. I do find version 1010-beta2 after a while and it detects the 40Gigger now. (No, I don't like the fact that it's called a Beta either) Then I had to drive home because SmilingGirl was waiting with dinner.

On the way home it struck me: the fucking BIOS of baloo isn't detecting the full 160Gig either! I should flash that BIOS too! So now the questions.

  • Is there a way to find out what motherboard baloo has? It was an OEM machine, not something I built. I tried looking at the board for clues, but it's mostly guesswork.
  • What will happen to the 160GB disk if I flash the BIOS? Will I still be able to access the existing partitions, or will I lose all my data? I could undo all I did (put everything back to the 40GB disk), then upgrade the BIOS and then put everything back to the 160GB disk. A lot of work to recover a mere 23GB.
  • Why do BIOS writers include these stupid limitations? I don't get it. Is it that hard to see that hardware will evolve and that such limits will sooner or later be broken? Oh, yeah, I forgot... nobody upgrades and buys just new machines. I've got SCSI cards that never complained about whatever size of disk you threw at them.

On a related, sad note: I'm typing this on a perfectly functional P-III 600Mhz/256MB RAM laptop which runs Debian Sarge. I like this installation, but when you will be reading this, Debian will be no more. Why? Well, I will install the evil OS (well the lesser evil OS called Windows 2000), because I intend to use it to prepare stuff for school. It will enable me to work in the living room while SmilingGirl watches TV or reads a book. It's going to be a tad bit hard to write VBA in Excel on Linux, isn't it?
The good thing is that I bought another harddisk with an enclosure so that I'll be able to backup all my data on the dual machine. When all data is safely outside the computer it will be reinstalled with a free system (probably FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Debian or Slack).

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Ask Slashdot: Harddisk size woes

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  • It's how you use it, right?
  • Might give you some clues...however I'm not certain.
  • XP is much nicer, and loads faster too.
    • I do respect you, but my first reaction on this was "Fuck you". XP is not nicer, to live with it I have to revert to classic. The loading faster is tweaking: your PC isn't responsive before it finishes loading all even if you see the desktop. The worst part is that it opens a vulnerable gap where the antivirus is not running and you are active on the desktop.

      No, definately... XP is not superior to W2k. W2k is leaner, meaner and waaaay more user friendly.

      • What's better in W2K? Besides of that gap. I don't care about it much since I'm paranoid enough to prevent myself to get infected.
        • My Average Win2k uptime I measured in months. Since I was forced to upgrade to XP, I'm lucky to make it a week without crashing.
          • XP seems to have real big problems with USB keychains. It crashes often when I use my keychain (BSOD). Under OS X and under Linux it never happens. So it is most certainly not the hardware.
            Win2K was the best OS that Microsoft ever brought out.
            • Yeah, if my DSL line ever gets out of sync with the phone company, I have to unplug it from the computer (it's USB). Win2k never had a problem with it, but WinXP crashes every time it's unplugged if I don't do the STOP HARDWARE thing, and half the time when I do. With Win2k, I just unplugged and windows would bitch that I didn't stop it first, but never crash.
      • XP is not superior to W2k. W2k is leaner, meaner and waaaay more user friendly.

        Substitute "admin" for "user" and I'll let what you said stand.

        XP's like a clean shaven, smiling apple-wannbe-geek. 2000's more of a burly, mean, "wish I was UNIX" geek.

        • XP's like a clean shaven, smiling apple-wannbe-geek. 2000's more of a burly, mean, "wish I was UNIX" geek.

          I beg to differ. My mom (the classic beta user) can use Win2000 just fine. My girlfriend (another classic beta user) has an XP box and she doesn't get along at all.

          Win2k limits the eyecandy, is halfway logically structured, doesn't have the stupid dog and I could rave on for quite a while. XP makes it a *bitch* to admin. Ever set up a crosscable on XP? I did, the warning I got was half a page

        • Why is W2K more admin-friendly?
          Actually it seems that XP has more options than W2K, which makes it more admin-friendly as well.. and fast user switching is neat.
          • More options? Perhaps... but they are better hidden. That's not helpful. If I need to config something I want it to be effective and fast. I don't want scary looking disclaimers. I want my configuration panel back as it was.

            I do grant you the Fast User switching. Very useful in family situations where there is only one computer. I have more than one computer, I can turn on a second one if I want. (Same counts for my family... enough computers there) Profiles are shared on the server, so it doesn'

          • The only people who actually think that XP is inferior to 2k are admins. Ergo, they must find it friendlier.

            XP has too many things aimed squarely at the "I want this to just work" user, ALL of which can be turned off and/or customized, for it not to be better than the code it started from.

            XP also defaults as having a bunch of wizards for everything. Which really aren't admin-friendly at all.
            • Well, yes and no. Technically I'm not an Admin. I'm just a long time computer user and they changed WinXP in such a way that the computer continually takes you as a complete and utter moron. It really insults computer-literate people. It continually tries to guess what you want to do, it also is continually wrong in guessing what I want to do.

              The learning curve from W2k to WXP is extremely big because they have hidden anything virtually interesting and if you find it they warn you in flashing red style


    • The size problems have definately NOTHING to do with Win2K.

      On thursday evening I installed a fresh copy of W2K Pro on a temp disk to be able to read a RAID disk of 159 Gig (2 80GB drives combined). See my journal for more info on that.

      What COULD be a problem is partitions that are too large.
      • Argh! Your journal about the crashed RAID-0 [slashdot.org] broke my heart.
      • Well, not exactly. Win2K service pack 2 does not support partitions larger than 137Meg. KB305098 [microsoft.com]. However, I did not have such large partitions (I usally have at least 5 partitions. Largest one bein the "Data Disk" which in this case was 77GB)

        It must be a BIOS problem.... I hate flashing BIOSes. :-(

  • Is there a way to find out what motherboard baloo has?

    When the BIOS screen first comes up on power on, there should be a VERY long number at the bottom. Write that down. Plug it into Google. You should find what the MB is.

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