Hard Drive Hiccups

PC-BSD 1.3RC1 has been released and I'm looking forward to giving it a try. The beta 2 was one of the smoothest installs I've ever had on my Frankenstein machine and I'm anxious to begin to really test it out.

Unfortunately, I ran into a few problems with the monster. I have a 160gb Seagate on the HPT66 onboard controller. It has 2 "normal" IDE drives and this ABIT BE6 was one of the very first boards to have a UDMA66 controller in addition (yup, that's how old it is). That's been a real sticking point for many operating system installs. Up until WinXP, I had to add a driver special for it at install time in order for it to be found. I eventually sort of gave up on using it, as it was so painful to get working.

But for the most part, PC-BSD worked just fine with it. I used the 1.2 installer to partition the hard drive into 4 40gb or so primary partitions, and use the various partitions to test install various versions of PC-BSD, usually with good luck. The fourth partition, however, was giving me some problems. It did not seem to want to boot anything off of it.

So I tried to install Ubuntu 6.10, just because I'm a glutton for punishment. Not like I don't have a million other things to do, but I figured I try this popular Linux distro, just to see how the other half lives, and to play with a GNOME system, as PC-BSD uses KDE as its primary window system. So I downloaded the ISO, burned the CD and booted it.

It's pretty cool, as the install CD doubles as a Live CD, which is nice. I don't like the brown color scheme, but I guess it is supposed to be suggestive of the African safari, which is where the name comes from. So I did the install and found some goods things and some bad things. It's easy to do, but some screens are still way too geekish, asking for you to pick (hd0) to install the loader. But the install went smoothly and so I rebooted.

But my boot manager couldn't find Ubuntu. This was strange, as I hadn't had this problem in the past. BootIT NG is a pretty solid piece of work and I couldn't figure out why it didn't see the new installation. So I started looking at the hard drive using the builtin partition tool, and it was insisting it was a 130gb hard drive, and not a 160gb hard drive. I used the UBCD to check out a few tools, and they too alll insisted it was a 130gb hard drive. Now I was really confused, as I don't keep meticulous records as to exactly what hardware is where, but I was still pretty sure it was a 160gb hard drive.

So I rebooted the PC-BSD install CD and it said it was a 160gb hard drive. Now I was really confused. So I went to the ABIT web sit, after I finally figured out it was an ABIT motherboard. I have 5 computers here and 3 or 4 old ones in the garage, all with different motherboards. I should keep better track of what is in what, but I don't. But this motherboard is so old, ABIT stopped updating the BIOS in 2000, and there was even a FAQ about the HPT card not seeing a hard drive as bigger than 137gb. So I think I figured out the mystery - the onboard UDMA66 controller was too old to properly recognize a 160gb hard drive and it was only through the magic of FreeBSD that it saw the correct drive.

So I started looking into building a new, fast computer and retiring this 900mhz beast. But by the time you put in a nice video card (US$350), motherboard (US$150), CPU (US$400) and memory (US$250), the cost was already over US$1000, and, needless to say, at this time of year I just don't have that kind of cash lying around looking to pump up my computer collection! And the 200gb hard drive I bought a few weeks ago is still sitting on my desk looking for a spot, and I'd be damned if I was going to put it into this thing that would only recognize 137gb of it!

So I checked in at the CompUSA web site and they have a very nice sounding ATA 133 card. It even does RAID, but I won't go that route right now. So I picked this US$30 card up. I'll probably try throwing it into my main machine, as it currently is using a slightly older IDE card for a couple extra hard drives. But maybe I'll first try it in the beast and see how it works. Hook up the 200gb drive to it too and see how it flies.

Windows often has problems with these IDE cards, but I've yet to have a problem with a BSD or Linux distro. They just pick it up and go with it, which is a nice change. Perhaps I can finally dedicate this machine to its originally envisioned purpose - as a Bacula server for the rest of my network. With 360gb of storage, it should be enough. Actually, there's a little more than that even, as it still has the 10gb(!) and the 20gb old fashioned IDE drives on it! Told you it was old.