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Intel DQ965GF Motherboard
How can I find out the maximum HD size supported by the BIOS installed
on this motherboard? Bios version is C096510J.86A.5493.2006.1102.1728. -- tb |
#2
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Intel DQ965GF Motherboard
tb wrote:
How can I find out the maximum HD size supported by the BIOS installed on this motherboard? Bios version is C096510J.86A.5493.2006.1102.1728. Rough rules of thumb. 1) Anything introduced after 2003, the IDE ports support 48 bit LBA. That allows large drive support. The largest IDE was 750GB, so you're in no danger of tripping any other bugs. .. The next practical limit, is the MBR limit of 2**32 sectors a.k.a 2.2TB limit. That's an issue when the BIOS goes to boot. 2) SATA ports should be OK. They're probably all designed to ATA/ATAPI 6 or later spec. No size limit like with IDE. There would be a 2.2TB limit for MBR based booting. If you use a 3TB or 4TB drive, visit the disk manufacturer's web page for the product, to read about workarounds, boot issues and so on. (I just checked the WD and Seagate sites, and I couldn't find the good info I used to be able to find, so this won't be as easy today.) The one exception, is motherboards with Silicon Image 3112 (add-on SATA controller chip), which has a "1TB freezing bug". This was fixed with an add-in ROM code update, but the update was delivered so late in the development cycle, that many boards did not have an opportunity to incorporate the change in time. My A7N8X-E, I got a BIOS for that one, with the SIL3112 bug fixed. Some other boards, the BIOS updates stopped, before that code came along. For those systems, if you connect a 1TB hard drive to the SIL3112 SATA port, the motherboard freezes and the board won't finish POST (until the drive is disconnected). So for your 2006 motherboard, I'd say "no more than the usual problems". Just do your homework before connecting a 3TB or 4TB hard drive. Or that new Hitachi drive which is helium filled (it is not in real volume production yet). There are two disk partitioning methods, MBR and GPT. GPT is for big drives and very recent OSes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record MBR limits the maximum addressable storage space of a disk to 2.2 TB (2^32 x 512 bytes) The OS support table for this one, is half way down. GPT boots with a UEFI BIOS, which you don't have. (I don't have one either.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified...ware_Interface I have a 3TB drive, and currently use the bottom 2.2TB part of it. That's partially because I'm using WinXP, and partially because I have some Acronis driver in my OS that needs to be removed, to make more of the disk available. I can't boot from that drive in any case, and boot from a smaller drive. The 3TB one is for backups n' stuff. HTH, Paul |
#3
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Intel DQ965GF Motherboard
tb wrote:
How can I find out the maximum HD size supported by the BIOS installed on this motherboard? Bios version is C096510J.86A.5493.2006.1102.1728. In your other thread, I gave a link to the specs on this mobo. One of the links mentions the mobo uses the ICH8DO I/O controller as part of its chipset. An online search on its specs found: http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc...-datasheet.pdf It mentions 48-bit LBA (logical block addressing). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_block_addressing There should be a setting the BIOS to select the addressing mode for the mass storage subsystem (hard disks). With any BIOS that supports LBA mode, it will be the default addressing scheme. LBA addresses by sectors where normally each sector is 512 bytes. So: (2^48 - 1) x 512 bytes = 281,474,976,710,144 bytes = 256 TiB With bigger sized allocation units, LBA will support up to 2 PiB. Well, one, you can't get a hard disk that big and, two, the hardware will have other limitations and, three, the Windows version will limit max memory addressing even further. If you read Nil's thread, you'll see he got a 4 TB hard drive but is stuck with 2 TiB partitions unless he uses a workaround. Windows XP doesn't support GPT or UEFI. He has to use the MBR scheme which has the 2 TiB partition size limit. Your previous thread asked about CPUs but never mentioned which OS (Window, Linux) or which version of it you intend to use. Although Windows Vista supports UEFI, it still has limitations on the partition size for booting; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Microsoft_Windows Then read the section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Operating_systems and note the 6th bullet that starts "Microsoft introduced UEFI ..." The GPT scheme to allow larger than 2 TiB partitions works with the UEFI BIOS (that replaces the old MBR scheme that incurs the 2 TiB partition limit on max size). The specs (see the link again for docs) don't mention UEFI or GPT so your old motherboard doesn't supports those. That means you also are stuck with 2 TiB maximum partition sizes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Pa...2-bit_versions shows charts of which bit-wise versions of Windows support GPT. Normally I would say that if UEFI is not available on your mobo that GPT won't be usable even if your choice of OS supports GPT. However: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table at the beginning notes some BIOSes support GPT. Yet I don't see in the specs for your mobo that GPT is mentioned. The MBR has 4 partition entries in its partition table. That means you can define a maximum of 4 *primary* partitions in the MBR (master boot record). If you only define primary partitions, that means you could use a 16 TiB hard disk and slice it into four 2 TiB partitions. However, you can also create a logical partition that can contain lots of logical drives (I forgot the max count of logical drives but it's big). So you could put in a super-huge hard disk but you'll still have to slice it up into 2 TiB partitions -- or use the workarounds mentioned in Nil's thread, like a translation driver. |
#4
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Intel DQ965GF Motherboard
On 12/9/2013 at 9:42:04 PM tb wrote:
How can I find out the maximum HD size supported by the BIOS installed on this motherboard? Bios version is C096510J.86A.5493.2006.1102.1728. You guys piques my interest with this GPT/MBR table issue. Let's assume for a moment that my motherboard supports UEFI (I know that it does not, but let's just assume this!). Furthermore let's also assume that I want to install Ubuntu on a brand-new, virgin HD. Is the GPT (or MBR) table installed/created by the operating system? Would Ubuntu give me a choice of whether to create a GPT or MBR table? Would Ubuntu also create the .efi file in addition to the GPT table? Just curious and completely inexperienced with these issues... -- tb |
#5
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Intel DQ965GF Motherboard
tb wrote:
On 12/9/2013 at 9:42:04 PM tb wrote: How can I find out the maximum HD size supported by the BIOS installed on this motherboard? Bios version is C096510J.86A.5493.2006.1102.1728. You guys piques my interest with this GPT/MBR table issue. Let's assume for a moment that my motherboard supports UEFI (I know that it does not, but let's just assume this!). Furthermore let's also assume that I want to install Ubuntu on a brand-new, virgin HD. Is the GPT (or MBR) table installed/created by the operating system? Would Ubuntu give me a choice of whether to create a GPT or MBR table? Would Ubuntu also create the .efi file in addition to the GPT table? Just curious and completely inexperienced with these issues... I don't have any UEFI motherboards here. I do have a 3TB disk, but no plans to boot from it. The Internet can help us here. Looks like GRUB needs a little extra space up near the front. If the disk is empty, it'll probably get it all right (since alignment now is to 1MB chunks, rather than 63 sectors). http://johnlewis.ie/converting-to-gpt-in-ubuntu/ The Wikipedia article says Ubuntu 8.04+ when it comes to distros that can handle GPT. Since not a lot of those old distros have servers for Synaptic, there's no point really, installing something that old. Anything recent should work. Paul |
#6
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Intel DQ965GF Motherboard
tb wrote:
On 12/9/2013 at 9:42:04 PM tb wrote: How can I find out the maximum HD size supported by the BIOS installed on this motherboard? Bios version is C096510J.86A.5493.2006.1102.1728. You guys piques my interest with this GPT/MBR table issue. Let's assume for a moment that my motherboard supports UEFI (I know that it does not, but let's just assume this!). Furthermore let's also assume that I want to install Ubuntu on a brand-new, virgin HD. Is the GPT (or MBR) table installed/created by the operating system? Would Ubuntu give me a choice of whether to create a GPT or MBR table? Would Ubuntu also create the .efi file in addition to the GPT table? Just curious and completely inexperienced with these issues... The BIOS never partitions the hard disk so the BIOS isn't writing anything on the hard disks regarding partitioning. The BIOS doesn't format the partitions, either. I don't use Ubuntu but did find this about it and UEFI: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI http://odm.ubuntu.com/docs/ubuntu-bi...quirements.pdf (a year old report) There is an alt.os.linux.ubuntu newsgroup where you could ask if and how Ubuntu utilizes UEFI. |
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