On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 09:54, Alan Dayley wrote:
> Victor Odhner said:
> > I have a computer with Win98 installed, on a disk
> > that may be dying.
> >
> > I have a nice 80GB disk to put on that machine,
> > if I can get past the BIOS to use even part of
> > it.
>
I had a similar experience and ran into quite a few limitations. I have
2 drives, a 60G and a 80G, Windows NT, and linux.
> Depending on how old it is, It should at least see 8GB, I think. There
> are special drivers from the hard drive manufacturers that work with Win98
> that allow you to see more than the BIOS limit. It has been too long
> since I have mucked with that stuff so I don't remember names. If you
> can't see more that that, I'd put a smaller drive in it. It'd be a shame
> to use only 10% of the drive.
>
> BTW, Linux does not depend on the BIOS information to learn a hard drive
> capacity. Therefore, Linux will use a large drive even if the computer's
> BIOS cannot "see" the entire capacity. :^)
I needed to do a BIOS upgrade (for the 80G, not the 60G). I don't
remember if Linux could see it all or not. Windows NT required the use
of the drive manufactures formatting program. That gave me usable fat
partitions but parted can no longer make any changes to that drive. The
other drawback is the drive manufactures formatting program totally
wipes the drive so I can't make any changes with that either.
>
> > So: If I use parted to create a partition the
> > same size as the old disk, how do I copy the
> > contents of old to new. A dd command?
> > Will that presumably result in a bootable
> > partition?
>
> No need to use parted if you use dd to copy the entire old drive. dd will
> copy the MBR, including the partition map and you'll end up with the same
> sized partition on the new one with the additional capacity as
> unpartitioned space. That's how it worked for me the last time I did this
> sort of thing going from a 10GB to a 40GB. Here is what I did:
>
I would be surprised if Windows could even see the bigger drive. I would
also doubt if copying the smaller drives contents with `dd` would change
that (but, I'm no expert)
I wish I had the time to try it.
Please post the results of this project. I know I could benefit from
your experience.
Thx,
Bart
---------------------------------------------------
PLUG-discuss mailing list -
PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings:
http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
(text/plain)