[mythtv-users] Backend with really crappy hardware

[Greg Foster]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:24:34 +0200, Maarten <mythtv at ultratux.org> wrote:
> On Friday 22 October 2004 15:07, Travis Kelley wrote:
> > You are correct about the hard drive issues...but that can pretty easily
> > be overcome by using a smaller hard drive to boot from.  I have an old
> > celeron 300a->450 system as my backend.  It didn't detect my 120 gb hard
> > drive so I installed a 400mb drive as the boot partition (possibly the
> > largest boot partition ever) and then linux has no trouble seeing the
> > larger hard drive after the kernel loads.  Then I just spin down the
> > small drives in my startup scripts so its not sitting there wasting
> > power all day.  Ah the joys of linux on old hardware.
> 
> I know, and used, that trick.  But it gave me no pleasure; the large drive
> would refuse to work in DMA mode, even though the hardware supposedly should
> support that.  Now I'm pretty sure 486 class machines didn't have DMA to
> begin with and I doubt running a Myth box in PIO mode would work very well.
[snip]

Another possibility is adding a Promise ATA-100 card.. although I'm
not sure if they require PCI 2.1 or not ?

Greg.