OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Storage

Question about SATA drives

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David Hart:
Its been a while since I re-used an old PC with spare drives.  The last time I did this was with EIDE drives.  With lots of spare drives, I did install ECS with different partitioning schemes so I know which one I want when I get ArcaOS.  I dont know if ArcaOS will handle larger drives better or not complain about partitioning other OS's do.

I tried today to install and pic SATA drive which I did see in the ECS 2.2 Installer, but I ran into the issue with how Windows partitions the drives complaining about the end of the drive.  I remember before that when I said "fix the errors" (or what ever it says) it did not fix them so I could not put the AIR-BOOT manager from the ECS 2.2 installer.

After that I just plugged Windows drive in the first cable and then the large ECS drive on the second cable thinking I would wait a few weeks and see.  I then realized that the BIOS on this box has an option to select a drive to boot and with this I can boot between Windows and ECS 2.2. 

Pressing ESC at boot up isn't that bad.  I may try swapping the cables and putting AIR-BOOT on the ECS drive and then add windows and see if that works but for now this solution is doable.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Doug Bissett:

--- Quote ---I tried today to install and pic SATA drive which I did see in the ECS 2.2 Installer, but I ran into the issue with how Windows partitions the drives complaining about the end of the drive.
--- End quote ---

I have one test machine with a 1 TB drive. ECS 2.2b2 will install anywhere on the disk, BUT you must do the partitioning (including the windows partition) with miniLVM, LVM, or DFSEE (must be run under OS/2). Windows must not be allowed to to the partitioning, or it is not compatible with OS/2 (including ArcaOS). I am not sure, but you may also need to use AHCI. I didn't try it with the Dani driver.

What I did, when I replaced the 500 GB drive, was do backups of everything (including windows), put the new disk in, then I booted the eCS 2.2b2 DVD, and did the partitioning for all of it, with miniLVM. Then, I restored all of it, making sure that windows never touched the partitioning. That part can be tricky, because windows thinks it owns the world. The windows backup tool, that I used, was the Seagate Disk Wizard, which is actually a reduced function version of Acronis (which is the only windows backup program, that I know of,  that does it properly). That program does require a Seagate drive (can be in a USB enclosure), but it is free. After that, eCS cooperated. Since then, I have installed ArcaOS a couple of times, with no troubles, that I didn't cause myself.

I will also note, that I put a 2 TB SATA drive into an older machine, that didn't have SATA support. I used a 4 Port PCI SATA RAID Controller Adapter Card (PCISATA4R1) which does not support AHCI. I still boot from an old 40 GB IDE disk, and I use the 2 TB disk to store my backups. it is effectively an OS/2 based NAS box, and it works very well with OS/2, windows (XP, 7 and 10), and I have used it with Linux Mint.

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