I want to add a third hard disk

[bandwidth_pig]

I have been thinking about adding a third hard disk to my Debian box. But am not sure that it will work and hoped some of you might have already done this. I don't have any kind of raid. My concern is the BIOS. My BIOS has only two places to list hard disks, and lists my current ones. My hardware setup is like so:

/dev/hda 120 gig WD IDE
/dev/hde 200 gig WD IDE attached via Promise PCI controller

On my other MB IDE port, I currently have a CDRW and regular CDROM.

I would like to add a third (200 Gig) to the Promise PCI controller and am hoping the Promise PCI controller will take care of any BIOS issues. But am not sure it will and wanted to try and figure that out before I purchase the new HD and case. Anybody ran into something similar? Interesingly, even though the 200 gig drive is on my Promise PCI, it still shows up in my main BIOS. Kinda curious about that one.

[pnuts]

you could take off the cdrom. can I ask what you are doing with 320gb of space?

[ricstr]

Im not 100% sure, but i think that the IDE controller has its own BIOS to deal with the drive configurations, if you want to boot of these drives on the controller you set in the system BIOS to use 'SCSI / Off Board Controller'.

[sclebo05]

you can def add another hd on the controller. i had 2 HDs running off of an old promise ata66 pci card along with 2 HDs, a burner and a DVD-rom off of the mobo ides. the purpose of the card is to add more ide devices. go for it. :)

[kevinalm]

What do you mean by two places to display ide drives? Do you mean that first a screen comes up and displays the four motherboard drive positions and later another detection screen comes up and probes the four pci contoller drive positions? Or something else?

[mdwatts]

Add the third HD as the secondary/master device (hdg) on the Promise controller.

[bandwidth_pig]

Originally posted by pnuts
you could take off the cdrom. can I ask what you are doing with 320gb of space?

I thought about that, but I have heard it is not good to run a CDRW or CDROM and HD off the same cable. As far as the space goes, I am using it for storage. I never delete anything.

[bandwidth_pig]

Originally posted by ricstr
Im not 100% sure, but i think that the IDE controller has its own BIOS to deal with the drive configurations, if you want to boot of these drives on the controller you set in the system BIOS to use 'SCSI / Off Board Controller'.

Thank you for the pointer. I just want to mount it. No need to boot yet...although I may put another OS on it at some point, so that is good to keep in mind.

[bandwidth_pig]

Originally posted by sclebo05
you can def add another hd on the controller. i had 2 HDs running off of an old promise ata66 pci card along with 2 HDs, a burner and a DVD-rom off of the mobo ides. the purpose of the card is to add more ide devices. go for it. :)

Thats the answer I was looking for. Thanks for the reply. Now I just need a bigger case :D

[just4spam]

Originally posted by pnuts
you could take off the cdrom. can I ask what you are doing with 320gb of space?

I doubt your motherboard's IDE port or BIOS will be able to see all the 200GB of HDD storage. If you connect it to your ccontroller card as another drive you'll be fine.

[evac-q8r]

Originally posted by just4spam
I doubt your motherboard's IDE port or BIOS will be able to see all the 200GB of HDD storage. If you connect it to your ccontroller card as another drive you'll be fine.

Hey just4spam ,

I was wondering how can you determine these so called limits of storage from the point of view of the BIOS. I thought that was more of a kernel issue.

EVAC

[just4spam]

I may be wrong, but I thought that the BIOS has to able support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA), which lets you access hard disks larger than 137GB.

I am a linux noob, so forive me if I was wrong :confused:

[banzaikai]

Howdy.

I've played with Promise controllers, and here's the lowdown.

First, any BIOS can use the bigger drives with the right "convincing". Normally, you can set a "compatibility jumper" on the drive and run the disk management software that came with the drive.

Or, you could just use a new controller card, which has it's own BIOS (called a "BIOS Extension"), which does all the work for you. It looks as if just4spam's Promise does allow the 200GB monster to rock-n-roll with the old mobo BIOS just fine.

As for adding drives, the Promise will allow adding at least another two drives (four on some models!) to your system.

BEWARE! As a user of SCSI myself, I can warn you firsthand about adding too many drives: Sure, the controller can see them all, but your power supply better be up to the challenge of spinning up all those platters, the mobo, and any usb devices hanging on the system. If your case allows it, ADD a second PSU for the drives, and power everything else from the other PSU.

Have fun...

banzai