"Big HDD"-limitations...

TheSwede · Thu Mar 04, 2004 4:56 pm

I've tried that "BIOS Patcher" for some old Pentium motherboards that I have and it worked like a charm. But now I wonder. What about adding 48-bit LBA on old motherboards, is it technical possible or is that chipset/hardware limitations ? Would be pretty cool to have a 250GB disk in your old Pentium machine!

Sincerly,

//The Swede

Thu Mar 04, 2004 6:06 pm

It is technically possible but it's not going to happen.

Fri Mar 05, 2004 12:12 am

Rainbow wrote:It is technically possible but it's not going to happen.

..because the patcher just fixes bugs in the Award BIOS that should have worked up to 128GiB anyway. 48-bit support requires new code to be integrated into the BIOS, no easy task.

sulbert · Fri Mar 05, 2004 12:28 am

At least with some old IDE controllers 48-bit LBA would only work in PIO modes (problems with transferring "long" addresses in UDMA modes).

And you can always use an add-in PCI IDE controller if you want to have a 250-GB disk in a Pentium machine

And actually there are plans to add 48-bit LBA support to BP...

TheSwede · Fri Mar 05, 2004 10:11 am

Thanks for all the replies! I'll sit down and wait for newer versions of BP!

//The Swede

Sat Mar 06, 2004 10:13 am

who cares if you own ftp-server is running PIO, it will always be far better data transfer than from the net. And 250GB is a lot of space to store your downloaded stuff...