Largest IDE hard drive supported by internal connector

[Davis Johnson]

>
> The original question was what was the size limitation for this 
> specific  and non-standard controller on the multia...and we got 
> sidetracked.   Thanks for the info though.  I still think that if your 
> hard drive is  unrecognizable to the hardware itself (which is not 
> what I said originally  I know, I was wrong about that) it doesn't 
> matter what the OS can do.
>
> Ted
>
Most (not all!) IDE interfaces are fairly transparent (and dumb). In 
most cases the hardware interface doesn't realy recognize drives. The 
BIOS may or may not recognize  a large drive. The BIOS may recognize the 
drive but only see as much of the disk as it understands. This happens a 
lot with older PC bioses. In this case it is possible to create a 
partition that falls entirly within the part of the disk the BIOS 
understands. This should be a bootable configuration. Once the kernel is 
loaded and you are using the kernel driver and not the BIOS the whole 
disk will be available. This allows all your mounted partitions, 
including root, to be past the BIOS limit.

If the BIOS refuses to cooperate at all you may get away with two 
drives, one to boot off of and one to be big.

Some IDE controlers are not that transparent. Hardware RAID controlers  
definatly aren't transparent. In this case, if the controler firmware 
won't recognize the drive you are out of luck.

As cheap as IDE drives have gotten I'd suggest giving it a shot if you 
can get the cable issues solved. I wouldn't worry too much about the 
difference between IDE and EIDE either. An EIDE drive will still support 
IDE transfer modes, and your IDE controler will probably pass EIDE 
commands without even looking at them.