[plug] Drive Overlays and Linux.

[Tomasz Grzegurzko]

On 10/4/06, Michael Holland <myk at myk.id.au> wrote:
>
> > On 10/4/06, Lee Jamieson <leejam at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Hiya all,
> > >
> > > I've got a p2 machine which is my webserver, and as it's old I doubt
> > > that there's any updates for the bios to accept a large(ish) drive.
> > > I'd like to put a 300 - 500Gb drive in to act as network storage.
> > >
> > > I have a small drive ~6Gb for / and everything else, so I wouldn't
>
> You could do that. Alternatively, just boot off a floppy drive or CD-ROM.
> You might use the 6GB drive just for /boot. After booting you can spin it
> down. (Those old drives are noisy.)
> Either way, you can still have the root partition on the big drive, just
> not the kernel.
>
> Better yet, go to Computer Angels, and buy a PIII box for $25.
>
> > > Do drive overlays work?  do I need one?
>
> When the old 6GB drive dies, you might regret that.
>
> > Try
> > # cat /proc/cpuinfo
>
>
> > The BIOS possibly won't support these drives from the mobo's IDE bus,
>
> But you only need the BIOS for loading the kernel & initrd, don't you?
>
> Mike.

True; that's what I was saying; after the kernel is loaded you'll be
fine. You will basically need another device (USB, SCSI, Network,
Floppy, CD, whatever the BIOS can sucessfully boot from) to use as a
"boot helper" for those big drives.

Tomasz