Serial ATA and 8gb bios boot limit?

[petreza]

Will serisl ata by any chance help removing the 8gb limit for boot partition? I know it is a bios problem but maybe, just maybe ...

[Jon]

The controller BIOS should take care of that for you.

[petreza]

Originally posted by Jon
The controller BIOS should take care of that for you.

Do you mean to say that if I use a SATA controller card in one of my PCI slots, it would have its own BIOS (similar to SCSI card BIOS, I guess) and that BIOS - because it's new (SATA) - will be able to boot from a partition that is beyond the 8gb limit?

How about SATA that is built-in the motherboard?

Thank you!

[Jon]

SATA built into a motherboard would be pointless unless it had greater than an 8GB limit, don't you think? ;)

But, yes, all controller cards have their own BIOS (accessible or not) which overrides the motherboard BIOS when assigning LBA limitations. This has been the only option for many who use older BX boards and the like that never got a BIOS update to remedy that problem. You should be able to assign whichever drive you wish to boot from within the controller BIOS. Your motherboard BIOS will simply need to be set to boot from EXT or SCSI in the place of HD-0.

[petreza]

Sorry for being such a pain but...

Would that apply also for regular, Parallel ATA expansion cards?

What I want is to get a 80GB drive, split it into 4 20GB partitions and install 4 different OSes in each one. With my current MOBO - ASUS CUSL2 I will not be able to do that because its BIOS will see only the first partition (8gb limit). So, if I buy a PCI ATA100 controller card, will I be able to do that?


Thank you very much!!!!!

[Avatar28]

Um, I've had a CUSL2 with a 40 gig HDD and it worked fine to boot to as one large partition. Or do you mean it's only an issue if the drive is split into multiple partitions?

[jloor]

nice info

[petreza]

Originally posted by Avatar28
Um, I've had a CUSL2 with a 40 gig HDD and it worked fine to boot to as one large partition. Or do you mean it's only an issue if the drive is split into multiple partitions?

Booting from one large partition is fine - during installation the OS is intelligent enough to put its boot files below the 8gb limit so BIOS can see them. But if, lets say, there are two partitions each with its own OS and the second partition is entirely above the 8gb limit, BIOS will NOT be able to boot from there. As far as I know those boot files are small - few Kbytes - so the second partition needs only be a megabyte below the limit.

OK