[ale] 750GB PATA drives killing my machine :(

[Greg Freemyer]

Resolved, but I still have a technical question.

Resolution: If you have a SIIG680 PCI IDE card which boots with a
3.0.x bios it will
not recognize drives larger than 500G.  There is an update program
which works from a DOS boot.

MY QUESTION: What is technically different about a 750GB drive and a
500GB drive?

I know about the 128GiB boundary that uses extra address bits (LBA28
vs. LBA48 iirc), and  1000GiB is as fas as you go with 31-bit
addressing (ie signed ints are ok to manipulate the sector #), and
2000GiB requires 32-bit addressing (ie unsigned ints required), but
what is special about 500GB?  Surely the old firmware was not doing
30-bit sector addressing.

That just does not seem logical.  Does anyone know?

Thanks
Greg

On 10/18/07, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/18/07, Robert Story <rstory-l at 2006.revelstone.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 17:25:15 -0400 Greg wrote:
> > GF> We've tried them on 4 of our lab machines.  2 work just fine.  2 fail
> > GF> to even get to the grub menu.
> > GF>
> > GF> All 4 machines have similar SIIG PCI IDE controller cards.
> >
> > What about motherboard/bios? Are all 4 the same?
> >
>
> They vary.  The 2 that work are both 1 month old Asus boards (both the
> same model).
>
> The 2 failing are different from each other.  One is a 6 month old
> (forgot the make), and the other is a 2 year old Gigabyte.
>
> Greg
> --
> Greg Freemyer
> Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer
>
> The Norcross Group
> The Intersection of Evidence & Technology
> http://www.norcrossgroup.com
>


-- 
Greg Freemyer
Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist
http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer

The Norcross Group
The Intersection of Evidence & Technology
http://www.norcrossgroup.com