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I have an old pentium 2 computer that is now minus a hard-drive because it is so aged. I have hooked up a maxtor 40gig upto it not expecting any problems but when I try to boot a cd and install I cant see the hard-drive. can anyone help me out here? It's such a shame to have hardware on my finger tips but not be able to use it
It may be necessary to set a jumper on the hard drive for compatibility with older motherboards. This will make the motherboard's BIOS think that the drive is only 32gigs big, or only 2gigs big.
However, linux accesses the IDE controller directly rather than going through the BIOS. As such, it will know the true size of the hard drive and will be able to use all 40 gigs.
Another method which MIGHT work is to go into the BIOS and manually set the cylinder configuration of the hard drive, instead of setting it to autodetect. With autodetect, the BIOS might hang when it runs into numbers it can't comprehend (what!!??!!? a hard drive bigger than 2048megs!!?!!??? DOES NOT COMPUTE).
There's also a possibility that the motherboard's IDE controller can't handle LBA (which is used by "large" IDE drives). However, I'll bet that a Pentium 2 era motherboard can handle LBA just fine. It might not be able to handle double-pumped LBA, but chances are a 40gig Maxtor won't need double-pumping.
If you just can't get the hard drive to work, then another possibility to consider is learning how to do diskless netbooting. You can turn an old P2 computer into a silent diskless workstation by removing the (LOUD) CPU fan and undervolting the PSU fan (reduce from the default 12 volts to 5volts by connecting it up to red/black molex power lines). I've found that P2 and P3 processors take nicely to the removal of the CPU fan. The CPU fan is actually not needed to prevent overheating, even if the heatsink seems pretty small.
Brilliant. thanks a lot I will give this a try and let you know how I get on:D