[mythtv-users] Backend with really crappy hardware

[Maarten]

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. 

Maarten