M571 32 Gig drive Bio's limitation

[sonyfier]

Having recently installed a 30 gig IBM drive to my M571 and being aware of the bio's limitation of drives larger I was wondering how this is got around with newer machines and what is substantially different in the bio's?

In a nut shell I'm asking with all the tinkering that's been done and what's known about this board why hasn't anyone experimented with a bio's bin file to see whether it can be got around? Obviously PC chips has finished with anymore updates to the bios's.

This is all well beyond my abilities but there must be someone out there with the knowledge to do it? or is there limitations preventing it in the onboard chipset?

Just some thoughts for discussion. :)

[gilles lussier]

Somebody would have to provide the extended int13h routines required to access drives larger than 32gb.

[brad]

That will take more of an explanation than I think most of us can give. What a lot of us do know about this we learned elsewhere, and rather than give it to you second hand and run the risk of making mistakes, I think it better to provide you links to what is widely regarded as one of the most well prepared, most complete, and authorative references on this subject available on the web:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/index.html

The section dealing more specifically with your interest is at:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bios/over.html

I think you'll find enough there to get the idea that this is way beyond the abilities of anyone except a genuine BIOS programmer. I'm a retired engineer with a fair amount of programming experience and it is beyond my abilities even though I understand the material!

Once you have studied the reference material there I think you'll also find that the changes needed involve additional code which the M571's BIOS chip may not have the space to accomodate. These are the extensions to the INT13h handler that Giles mentioned.

By all means spend as much time there as it takes to become familiar with the material. Plus there is a lot more there than just BIOS barriers. You'll be glad you did.

Brad

[gilles lussier]

Brad, I didn't think you were an old man. :) I'm also an engineer, close to retirement but not quite yet. :)

It the bios doesn't have huge hard-drive support, it might be easier to use software such as Maxblast from Maxtor to access these drives.

[brad]

Yessir. I'm 52 and retired from for medical reasons. Hope you will be able to enjoy you're retirement more than I am!

Maxblast and similar are an easy solution but there is another that may be better for others. A PCI ATA-100/133 controller with its own BIOS will circumvent the size limit plus increase performance by taking advantage of today's drives with 40 Mb/sec or better data rates. The controller may be a waste of money because it isn't needed when upgrading to a current mobo, but new 7200 rpm ATA-100/133 drives will be right at home.

Brad

[sonyfier]

Thanks for the replies and links I will be sure to read them. :)


Brad
With regard to a seperate "A PCI ATA-100/133 controller with its own BIOS"
What is the situation with the current IDE connectors........ are they disabled or used in conjunction with new controller to give you more IDE channels?

Also if the new controller is able to be used with existing one doe's the new controller have precedence over old? ie will drive on new controller be C:\ with old controller still in use?.
Any advice on these add on controller cards would be appreciated. :)

Sorry for all the questions but as I said in another thread I'm building a new computer but I'm not done with the M571.........I wan't to network it to new machine and mainly use it for storage and backup over network hence my curiosity on large drives on M571.

[gilles lussier]

You can't, as soon as you'll enable the pci ide controller the onboard controller will be disabled. You can read this information on page 28 of the m571 manual. In my opinion, it is much more effective to go with the software solution instead of buying a pci controller. If you are going to use that computer as a file server or filebackup server, your bottleneck will still be the network link.

[brad]

Gilles's comments are correct. Also, adding a PCI based controller can be problematic for the inexperienced. I only mentioned it because it is an option. A software solution like maxblast is much easier to use.

I'd also add that unless you have a dedicated backup device like a zip drive, tape drive, or cd burner, having two hard drives is always better than just one. That way you can have copies of your own stuff like drivers, docs, pics, archives, downloads, etc on two drives for safety in case one drive fails. Combining a software solution with at least two drives is probably the most effective solution for you.

Brad

[jim chase]

I just had my first experience with a drive overlay program last month, worked pretty neat.

Installed a 3.2GB WD on an IBM PS/1 486 with a dying 540MB Seagate. The IBM bios detected the WD drive as a 45MB drive! The drive overlay allowed partitioning and seemless access to the full drive.

The old IDE interface did bottleneck the drive but at 1.6mb a second it was still about three times faster than the original drive. The end result, a happy customer and friend :D

For automatic backups to another partition or drive there's a nice little free download called "TaskZip."

Jim

[sonyfier]

Originally posted by brad
Gilles's comments are correct. Also, adding a PCI based controller can be problematic for the inexperienced. I only mentioned it because it is an option. A software solution like maxblast is much easier to use.

I'd also add that unless you have a dedicated backup device like a zip drive, tape drive, or cd burner, having two hard drives is always better than just one. That way you can have copies of your own stuff like drivers, docs, pics, archives, downloads, etc on two drives for safety in case one drive fails. Combining a software solution with at least two drives is probably the most effective solution for you.

Brad

I remember seeing somewhere someones comments recently about adding an additional card for added IDE channels..............that's how my misconception arose.

This is how my M571 system is currently setup
Dual Boot with:

IBM IC35L030AVER07 30.73 gig drive setup on first IDE channel along with a DVD Rom drive as slave.
CD Rom burner setup on second channel as master.
I have other hard drives but none currently installed.

My hard drive is partitioned into 3 partitions C: (Windows ME)remains a very small 3 gig partition which is plenty for what I currently have on C: and also allows me to backup to a spare drive I have of same capacity.

Second partition (NTFS) currently has win XP on it which I'm playing with and is set around 8 gig.
The remaining space is a Fat32 partition that both OS can see and use.
I do a lot of burning and ripping of DVD's etc so the remaining partition doesn't give me much room to store files too and work with DVD's as well.
I also have a huge picture collection which changes constantly with new additions and renaming etc.

Using CD Rom to store files is problematic because what I keep is constantly changing and updating. Using CDRW is too risky especially with packet writing which is too easy to get corrupted.

What I wan't to do is once my new system is built is put a very large drive on M571 as D: and backup to it across a network which will give me the safety factor of having multiple copies of files in two places independent of anything that can go wrong with one machine or it's drives.

Using a drive overlay program would allow a larger drive on M571 but it wouldn't allow an increase in speed of drive to latest standard, also I am not fond of the idea of software solution that could become corrupted, another aspect is any drive in the M571 may need to be moved or accessed in another computer that wouldn't need the overlay program to read large drives.
I keep all my drives in mobile racks which makes this quite easy and also allows me to remove from my machine when I'm away from house, (rest of machines are replacable with insurance information on drives isn't)

So my thinking is to purchase one of these controller cards to bring M571 up to newer ATA 100 standard and large drive support, I can then backup from new machine to it over network as well as all the files I download. I can also archive some of my music and video collection to them which are at risk due to the carelessness of teenagers.

So CDR doesn't cut it as a suitable backup medium for me both because of size and changing files.

Hope that all made sense. :)

Update:
I was just going through the specs and info of the latest ATA/133 controller card from promise and it says it does coexist with existing onboard controller to allow use of up to 8 IDE devices ............4 on new controller and 4 on existing motherboard.

The PDF file can be found at this link http://www.promise.com/Products/Ultra133TX2/Ultra133_TX2_Product_Launch.pdf

[jim chase]

Posted by Sonyfier,

"Update:
I was just going through the specs and info of the latest ATA/133 controller card from promise and it says it does coexist with existing onboard controller to allow use of up to 8 IDE devices ............4 on new controller and 4 on existing motherboard. "


About this coexist thing. I believe it's still dependent on the M/B bios. I used an old promise ultra 33 on a Tyan M/B with Award bios, it allowed the use of eight drives including the M/B ide. I also tried the ultra 33 on the M571 but it wouldn't work without the M/B ide being disabled as required by the AMI bios.

The promise card may be capable of coexisting but is the M/B willing? You know what they say, it takes two to tango:) .

Jim

[gilles lussier]

Sonyfier, maybe Promise knows more about the M571 then PcChips. The information I gave you was taken from the M571 manual. You can purchase a controller and find out for yourself.

[sonyfier]

Originally posted by gilles lussier
Sonyfier, maybe Promise knows more about the M571 then PcChips. The information I gave you was taken from the M571 manual. You can purchase a controller and find out for yourself.

I might do that yet.
I'm not fussed if if doesn't coexist as the primary reason would be the ATA 100 and large drive support, if it coexisted and allowed 8 channels that would be a bonus but I doubt I would ever need more than the 4.

Thanks everyone for replies I will post results if I get one. :)