# 300GB drive upgrade with floppy possible?



## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

I am trying to upgrade from an 80 GB to a 300 GB HD. The PC, that I have at the moment, has dead secondary IDE bus, so I can't attach 2 hard drives plus a CD drive. Is there a floppy that has the LBA48 kernal and MFStools?


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## Freightdog (Aug 24, 2005)

The boot cd image is at least 10 - 12 mb, so I see no way you could get that on a 1.44mb floppy. I doubt the linux kernal would even fit by itself. (But I don't know its size)


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## robn77 (Oct 26, 2001)

I just downloaded linux and loaded it into a spare HD so I could run the backup/restore without the CD. My Dell only has one IDE connector.


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## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

Freightdog said:


> The boot cd image is at least 10 - 12 mb, so I see no way you could get that on a 1.44mb floppy. I doubt the linux kernal would even fit by itself. (But I don't know its size)


the old CD image was also that big, but there was a floppy too. I can't imagine that the LBA48 kernel is that much bigger


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## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

Ok i had an idea I was wondering if will work:

since i only have 1 ide bus, 

would it be possible connect the source drive t the master and the new drive to the slave and to use the old MFStool 2.0 floppy to 

&#65279;mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda | mfsrestore -s 127 -r 4 -zpi - /dev/hdb

then disconnect the old drive and connect the CD drive to the master and use the weeknees CD to
&#65279;mfsadd -r 4 -x /dev/hdb

any problems with that?


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Your 2 step process should work, go for it. Report back and Let us know how it works out. 

Does your computer support booting from a USB drive there are Linux distributions that fit well on a 32M USB thumb drive.


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## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

HomeUser said:


> Your 2 step process should work, go for it. Report back and Let us know how it works out.
> 
> Does your computer support booting from a USB drive there are Linux distributions that fit well on a 32M USB thumb drive.


this computer doesn't even have a usb port, it's a 10 year old Gateway P5-166.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

TiVoDan said:


> this computer doesn't even have a usb port, it's a 10 year old Gateway P5-166.


 It would be perfect if only both IDE channels worked have you checked the BIOS settings. For 2 years I thought the CD drive was bad in the Gateway2000 at work then one day I was in the BIOS and discovered that the internal EIDE controller was set to Primary instead of both.


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## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

HomeUser said:


> It would be perfect if only both IDE channels worked have you checked the BIOS settings. For 2 years I thought the CD drive was bad in the Gateway2000 at work then one day I was in the BIOS and discovered that the internal EIDE controller was set to Primary instead of both.


Good call with the BIOS, now all drives are being recognized. 

Npw a diffferent problem is showing up. when i try to boot the Weaknees CD, the kernel starts loading, but after about 3 seconds the computer reboots. i'm thinking the problem is another BIOS issue, but i don't know what it would be.


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## HomeUser (Jan 12, 2003)

Did it boot from the CD before? 


Bad/Corrupted image or burn on the CD 
Bad CD drive 

Memory issues 

Hardware conflict (could be why the IDE was turned off) try removing unused hardware the Modem, Sound card, Network card ...


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## wscannell (Dec 7, 2003)

If the above does not work, you might try the ptvupgrade.com LBA48 boot CD instead.


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## TiVoDan (Jun 2, 2002)

HomeUser said:


> Did it boot from the CD before?
> 
> Bad/Corrupted image or burn on the CD
> Bad CD drive
> ...


 CD boots on my core duo iMac. Removing harware from the PC didn't help.


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