I'm having problems installing a new 160gb IDE drive on an older P3-class machine which had a ~40gb drive before. I have copied (using DD command on terminal within a linux bootcd) everything from one partition to the other even including the MBR and boot sectors and the drive will not boot off the new drive when the old drive is unplugged. Note that the OS is Win2k on the old hard drive and i'm simply doing a mirror to the other.

I remember something (pretty hazy memory) about older systems not being able to address larger hard drives, and needing a bios fix to be able to address the larger drives. Is this correct and what is the size limitation?

Anyone have any ideas I can try to make this big P.I.T.A go away??

Thanks,
Aaron

I don't know but are you still going to sell me one of those rackmount cases?

A lot of older machines, P3 and earlier, had limitations on the IDE controller, not just the filesystem, the limit on most older machines was 120 gb if my memory serves

127 i think, although some can overcome this with a bios update, however, in most cases it requires a new ATA controller.

i guess this might give you hope...but I was able to run my file server (2 300gb IDE hard drives) on an old board with a 533 amd k6-2 in it. Oh ya and 64 meg of ram

Go pick up a cheap IDE controller card, it'll fix your troubles.

i actually think its a 132 gb barrier... but none the less we have deamed its an issue with drives bigger then 120gb..

unless a bios update is there for your board to fix the size issue you are gonna need to get an ide card... or give up and get a new board