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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in1.uu.net!csnews!boulder!coopnews.coop.net!hops.entertain.com!usenet From: dwatson@abwam.com (Darryl Watson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: New BIOS for 4gig drive? Date: 23 Dec 1995 15:52:05 GMT Organization: ABWAM, Inc. Lines: 39 Message-ID: <4bh8j5$qfa@hops.entertain.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp013.entertain.com X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.92.5 Hi! I am running BSDi 2.0 with patches. I have a lame-o 2 year-old Micronics 486/66 EISA motherboard, a BusLogics 747C(?) SCSI controller, and have 3 1- or 2-gig SCSI-II drives currently running. I started running out of disk space for news, so I added a DEC 4-gig drive. I couldn't get disksetup to write a label on the drive, or to remember partition info, so I newfs'ed the C partition, and am using that for news. When I reboot the machine, right before the drive names get printed on the screen, and before the BSDi boot block gets loaded, I get a message which says something to the effect that I have to upgrade my BIOS! This seems to be coming from the BusLogics card, not BSDi. I didn't get this message before adding the 4-gig drive, so I suspect that my BIOS is an earlier one which either can't support a 4-gig drive, or can't support 4 gigs in a single partition. ;) It would also explain why I got 'can't write label' messages when I tried to partition the drive. The drive performs poorly. One of my friends suggested that when I newsfs'ed the drive for news (per the Lizard book suggestion), I created a mess-load of inodes, and that too many are hampering the drives' performance. I think that all of the above problems will be resolved with either: 1) A BIOS upgrade to the motherboard 2) A newer motherboard (anyone want a crappy motherboard?) 3) Some sort of BusLogics EEPROM upgrade. Does anyone know what is really happening here? I am not inclined to put any more money in the Micronics board; I may just go out and get a new Pentium board. Thanks for any help.