I want to purchase a new hard drive to be a slave drive for my current desktop machine. It currently has a 40GB ATA hard drive made by Quantum Fireball, and it has a slot to accept a second drive. This computer runs Linux, but hardware should be software-ignorant anyway. (OS-dependent hardware is the height of stupidity.) I feel confident I can install the drive successfully if it has the correct connector and comes with screws.
My question is this: How do I make sure I’m buying a drive that will work with my system? Are there important distinctions within the class of ATA drives, (if so, what are they), and how can I be sure my system will accept the one I decide to buy?
No important distinctions for IDE hard drives really. Some of the newer Maxtor drives are ATA-133 but those are backwards-compatible with previous ATA standards (66, 100) so you won’t need any special hardware to use them.
Depending on the size of the new hard drive you may need to flash your motherboard BIOS so it recognizes the full capacity of the drive. This is an OS-independent procedure, although you’ll probably need to make a DOS boot floppy to run the BIOS update utility.
Seagate Barracuda drives are the quietest, although all ATA drives as a group are getting quieter.
Thank you for the info. According to Froogle, the highest-priced Seagate Barracuda drive is $16,383 ( :eek: ), and the lowest are two-gig units at $19.95. What a spread!
(Seeing 200 GB hard drives is not nearly as amazing as knowing that yes, I will find use for all that space.)
I thought the process of installing a hard drive was OS-independent. I don’t think I can make a DOS boot floppy, seeing as how I run Linux, but I’m sure Linux has similar functionality (or I can figure something out anyway).
There is a lot out there. I’ll probably start an IMHO thread about who has the best prices.
Any internal ATA drive should work with Linux, provided that it actually follows the standard - if you can read your current HD with your current kernel, a new IDE drive should work. However, a few controller chipsets out there just have problems in general - your copy of the kernel source (yo have one, right?) will have details on the specific workarounds you can enable in order to use known buggy chipsets. In general, if you’re using a distribution-provided kernel, all of these workarounds were probably enabled.
One important point to make here is that many (even most) consumer-packaged HDs sold these days come preloaded with Windows-centric lowlevel formatting, in order for J. Random Enduser to be able to use the disk without understanding it. You should always run cfdisk on your drive to partition it (and set it to type 83, Linux native), even if you only want one big partition.
Well, there’s a technicality. The hard drive is OS-independent, up until the point where you format it with an OS-specific filesystem. But if you buy a large capacity drive (say more than 80GB) your motherboard BIOS may need to be updated so it recognizes the hard drive’s specs and “sees” all the drive space.
The programs that update the motherboard’s BIOS are not OS-independent… they need an OS to run on. Your motherboard manufacturer may or may not have a Linux-based BIOS update utility, but I can guarantee you they will have a DOS or Windows-based BIOS update utility.
Oh yes, the $16,000 price tag for a Seagate Barracuda drive was most likely for a lot of 200 of them, not a single drive. An 80GB IDE Barracuda HDDshould run around $100-110.
I’ve just got to mention that I strongly reccomend the lovely Western Digital Special Editions, in 80 or 120 GB. The 8 meg of cache makes a perceptible difference… cut my boot time to seventeen seconds from mark to mark in a Win2K system.
If you need a DOS bootdisk, I can email you an image that you can dd to floppy. If you do, mention it here rather than emailing me because I rarely read that account due to excessive spam.
dylan: Please do just that. My email address is in my profile and right at the bottom of the post (I’m a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy :)). Even if I end up not needing it for this project, it might be useful to have around just in general.
If you feel like compressing it (and you should), I can accept bzip2 files in addition to zip, Z, and gzip. bzip2 generally offers much better compression ratios and is both free of charge and open-source.
Derleth, find your your current drive type & buy one just like it–just buy the same model # & manf. You might find a 40gig for $50.00 these days. Type is written on top of the drive. how to put it in instructions are included with the drive too.
You can download DR-DOS 7.03 from www.drdos.com - this is a real competitor to MS-DOS from days of yore. It’s apparently free to download, so the BSA won’t bust you for copying MS-DOS illegally. (I’m not implying that you or dylan are doing anything wrong, as he hasn’t said what DOS he’s got an image of. I only provide this as an additional resource.)
It may come in handy for other things like running the DOS-only configuration utilities for older network cards, etc.
The only other thing to worry about might be master/slave configuration of the second drive, assuming it’s on the same IDE cable as the original.
Now I don’t fully understand what I’m talking about here (not that that has ever stopped me), but I think that if you have two IDE hard drives on the one cable, then one must be explicitly designated the master and one the slave.
There are a bunch of little jumpers on your average hard drive down near the power/ide connector and usually some tiny printing on the circuitboard on top. There are three settings of interest, and the setting is usually made by placing a jumper over one set of pins. Note that these settings are mutually exclusive; you should only have one per drive, and they should match.
[ul][li]Master or MS – this drive is the master on the IDE cable[/li][li]Slave or SL – this drive is the slave on the IDE cable[/li][li]Cable Select or CS – the type of drive is selected depending exactly on which of the two IDE connectors on the cable you plug it into[/li][/ul]
If you get it wrong, then the startup BIOS will probably not see one of the drives. I think that’s about the worst that will happen; you won’t fry anything. I think if you try to designate two masters on the same IDE chain, then the BIOS will see neither of them.
Usually the harddrive will come with a diagram showing you what and where the jumpers are, or you can go to the manufacturer’s website and poke around. And Radio Shack will sell packets of the little jumpers for a couple of dollars for 6, which is really useful when you drop one on a carpet! :rolleyes:
Scruff: I know about jumpers and cables. None of that frightens me.
handy: Yeah, it’s hard to go wrong when you buy what you know works.
douglips: Corel owns all of the old Digital Research properties. They’ve released CP/M into the public domain, but I was unaware of them doing the same with DR-DOS.
