How can I get a 3TB HDD working with an older BIOS?

[fredweston]

I picked up an older industrial PC that was getting thrown away from work. It was a fax server, but my plan was to turn it into a home NAS because it's small, quiet and, perhaps most importantly, has a low power draw.

The PC itself doesn't have a brand name on it (it looks like it was OEM'd to the fax server company's specs) but the motherboard says GME945 v1.1 on it. Google tells me that's an MSI industrial board. I wasn't able to find much info on their website about it, but after some searching I was able to find a BIOS update for it so I updated it from 1.05 to 1.10 thinking that might help but it didn't.

It has an Award BIOS and the drive in question looks to be properly detected there (when I go under Standard CMOS features it shows the drive and when I look at the properties of the drive it shows the size as 3000 GB. However, after POST the splash screen that comes up immediately before the OS starts to load shows the drive size as 801 GB.

The root issue I'm having is that the OS will not load. I installed Debian 7.2 and the install went fine, however when Debian tries to boot I get an error "error: out of disk" and it enters grub rescue mode. My assumption is that this is related to the drive being improperly detected because it's too large. Google seems to confirm that, but I'm not sure if there's anything else I can do or if I just have to admit defeat.

Here are some photos to give some perspective to my words. Although everything is listing the drive as IDE, it is a SATA drive.

 

[aldan]

by the sounds of the volume of that drive it looks like your system only supports up to 1tb hdd.

 

[Calvin7]

MBR (Master Boot Record) only supports 2TB drives, you need GPT (GUID Partition Table) format for drives over 2TB. Older BIOS means that you can't use anything other than MBR format for a boot drive. You need a UEFI BIOS to use a GPT format on the boot drive. You may have success if you use it as a non-boot data drive with a GPT format. Your operating system, and SATA driver also need to support the use of drives over 2TB.

 

[fredweston]

MBR (Master Boot Record) only supports 2TB drives, you need GPT (GUID Partition Table) format for drives over 2TB. Older BIOS means that you can't use anything other than MBR format for a boot drive. You need a UEFI BIOS to use a GPT format on the boot drive. You may have success if you use it as a non-boot data drive with a GPT format. Your operating system, and SATA driver also need to support the use of drives over 2TB.

The PC case only has room for a single HDD, but it sounds like it might work if I booted from USB and used the 3TB drive as a data volume. Maybe that explains why I was able to install Linux - I booted the installer from a USB stick.

 

[fredweston]

Update - I installed a 250 GB HDD for the OS and tried using the 3TB drive as a slave for data only (non-boot). This still didn't work properly so I have given up. I was hoping to make use of this free lower power system so I didn't have to leave my desktop PC on all the time, but it was not to be.