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I have a ThinkCentre M90z that came with Windows 7 that I want to upgrade the hard drive. It uses the standard old style bios. It takes a standard 3.5 inch Sata drive. Right now it boots with Grub4dos that I think was created from a Tahr pup boot disk.
I've noticed huge 6 TB or so GPT sata disks have become affordable.
Will I be able to set it up to boot with using Grub2 the standard Puppy/Fatdog/Debian Dog tools? Is 2TB the max partition size (that's fine)?
@dancytron
I've noticed huge 6 TB or so GPT sata disks have become affordable.
Grub2 will work fine, but not necessary. Legacy bios won't support GPT, so you'll have to reformat. Also, best to keep the partitions max 2tb.
wizard
Big pile of OLD computers
@dancytron
Not sure what you're considering, but most of the used drives out there bigger than 2tb are SAS interface server drives. SAS interfaces are not compatible with SATA desktop computers even if you use a connector adapter (you'd need a SAS controller). Also, be very wary of any SSD in that TB range as the mfg may have spoofed the capacity.
wizard
Big pile of OLD computers
https://superuser.com/questions/1245299 ... non-boot-d
discusses the constraints of using GPT with bios firmware
A "Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB 7.2K 3.5" SATA 6Gb/s 64MB HDD Hard Drive" is on it's way, so we'll see.
Dan
edit: It finally arrived. It shows up as slightly less than 2 TB on all my computers, including in Windows 10, when in my early USB 2 era docking port.
Using @rcrsn51 Debian Dog install software, Windows 10 disk manager, a gparted, I tried a couple of different ways to use the gpt partition table, gave up, and changed it to msdos in gparted, made a couple of 100 gig ext4 partitions and was able to install Debian Dog the normal way so it boots from USB on the computer it's supposed to go in to.
I guess I'm going to get it migrated over and install it. Maybe the 2 TB will reappear when it's hooked up to SATA instead of USB 2. Probably not.
So, I set it up as a mirror of the existing drive in my usb 2 era dock (can only use 2 TB), used Stretchdog to make it bootable with grub4dos just like the existing drive (it boots over usb with the existing menu.1st file), and wrote some little rsync scripts to keep it synced up (but not delete big downloads I move to the new drive).
I think that's good for now. Now I can put it in the Thinkcentre if the harddrive failes, or maybe straight into whatever desktop replaces it when Windows obsoletes this next set of perfectly good computers.