Well to make a long story short, I’ve got my older brothers old PC (whats left of it). It’s missing it’s Graphics card, Optical Drives, and DDR1 SDRAM and only has a WinModem for it’s Cards but other wise it’s functional. It’s a originally a Dell Dimension 4500, Ma has a 4550 so i used her user manual to check what kind of RAM I would need.
If I bought 256~512mb of RAM and a Networking card I could get a 4th PC running, maybe try and get a Wifi adopter for it so I could move one of the Towers into my room (where my Laptop usually is stored)… 5 PC’s hehe that would be nice!! And if I get enough money for Christmas I could do it.. I could also buy Ma some RAM to upgrade her PC, or just buy her a new 1GB’s worth and take her old 512’s set.
The Box has a Pentium 4, probably ~2Ghz… Compare to my File Servers Katmai (Pentium 3, 500Mhz).
Having 512MB RAM would be an upgrade from 384MB-8MB for Matrox Gfx that the server has. Even if I had to make do with only 256MB, the processor upgrade would be worth it imho.
I have an old ATI Ultra Rage 128 AGP4X card on my shelf, a 32MB card should be overkill for any thing but gaming.
The IMPORTANT thing is, the hulk came with a 40GB Western Digital PATA drive and a 80GB Hitachi PATA drive.
My OpenBSD server is running off an old Office Desktop PC (cica 1998/1999) and only has an old 8GB Maxtor PATA drive. The BIOS also has a known problem that it can only address up to about 33GB of disk, any more would be wasted.
Guess what… OpenBSD can use the entire drive !!!!!
I installed the 80GB HDD and hooked it up to the (E)IDE cable and power thingy and checked the BIOS to see the setup, I could see that the 8GB root disk was Primary Master, 80GB drive as Primary Slave, and the CD-ROM drive as Secondary Master.
I didn’t really learn much about the innards of Computers by looking it up. I learned most of what I know by pulling a PC apart and putting it back together again.
I tried to mount the disk but could not, even with the mount_ntfs program. Probably because of no disklabel. I booted off my Knoppix Live CD to see if it was working. Sure enough, Linux found a ~75GB /dev/hdb1 and was able to mount it as NTFS. I reformatted it FAT32 and booted back to OpenBSD.
To set up the hard drive for usage, I fdisk’d it
fdisk -i wd1
I gave it a yes to updating and moved on to labeling the disk.
disklabel -E wd1
I used the g d command in disklabel to tell it to use the disks geometry and not the BIOS. I setup a 4.2BSD Partition (wd1a) for the full size of the disk and wrote the label out.
Next I formated it with the UFS file system used in OpenBSD.
newfs wd1a
and mounted it to a temporary mount point
mount /dev/wd1a /mnt
And volia it worked !!! I moved every thing from /usr/local/* to /mnt/ and edited /etc/fstab with instructions to auto-mount the new 80GB drive in it’s place.
Terry@vectra-$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/wd0a / ffs rw 1 1
/dev/wd0h /home ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0d /tmp ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0g /usr ffs rw,nodev 1 2
/dev/wd0e /var ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
# 80GB Primary Slave, PATA drive.
/dev/wd1a /usr/local ffs rw,nodev 1 2
Terry@vectra-$
Now I have good solid storage… No more trying to cram network shares and LAN backups onto a small ~7GB /usr partition.
Terry@vectra-$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/wd0a 147M 31.3M 109M 22% /
/dev/wd0h 393M 378K 373M 0% /home
/dev/wd0d 98.3M 2.0K 93.4M 0% /tmp
/dev/wd0g 6.7G 398M 6.0G 6% /usr
/dev/wd0e 148M 8.3M 132M 6% /var
/dev/wd1a 73.3G 2.5G 67.2G 4% /usr/local
Terry@vectra-$
I love BSD !!!