Large IDE drive in E60

[rla]

After poking around these forums it seems clear that it's not possible to use a IDE HDD larger than 8G with an E60. If I add a PCI disk controller, could I use a large drive in the E60? I was thinking of adding a PCI ATA100 controller and a 80G drive to our E60. The SCSI drive that came with it died and this seems like a reasonably priced way to reuse the box with more capacity.

[adam tekieli]

No IDE HD Support on E60, so nobody can tell you if it works untill someone will try it. It should work beacuse your PCI Card include BIOS that support larger IDE Drives but not warranty how stabil will be your server after this change.

[rla]

Followup to my own question; this did not work, at least it didn't with the ATA100 controller I tried. When installed, the new controller would recognize the IDE devices attached to it (the 80G drive and the CD-ROM). But, even after disabling the internal IDE controller and trying every conceivable combination of boot device order/priorities, the machine would not boot off anything attached to the add-in controller.

All was not lost though... I did discover that after updating the atapi.sys driver for NT, that NT could see the remainder of the 80G drive on the internal IDE controller! I've divided it into one 8G partition and the remaining 72G into another partition formatted with NTFS - now working fine.

[Greg Carlson]

rla,

Did the add in card show up in the bios as a bootable card? If so sometimes you need to enable the bios of the card to make it bootable. Sounds like you have it resolved however which is good news. Ciao,
Greg