Old Computer, New External USB Drive
Bombadil
I've got this old computer that needs a hard drive,
and I was thinking that I could get an external USB
harddrive and boot a kernel from a CD (the BIOS doesn't support
booting from USB) pointing to the USB drive as the root device.
The old computer has a USB-1 bus and the USB hard drive would
be a USB-2 device. Is this a problem?
Thanks for any advice here.
Bombadil
JohnF
It's okay if you're satisfied with the usb1 speed.
I've tried upgrading several old computers that came equipped with usb1
by plugging in a pci i/o card with onboard usb2. Doesn't work.
Devices that are plugged in are recognized and seem to mount okay, and
they begin to read or write. But after just a few seconds linux begins
to emit i/o error messages, and then the operation hangs until
it times out. I've seen pretty much exactly the same behavior on
three old computers I've tried to upgrade (with different cards,
so that's not the problem). Don't know what the problem is.
I'd originally guessed that maybe the MB couldn't handle the
bandwidth required by usb2, but was told that's unlikely.
--
John Forkosh ( mailto: j...@f.com where j=john and f=forkosh )
watcher
On t'other hand, I rescued an old Dell Optiplex from the trash and installed a
USB 2 card in it. The card runs fine at full speed. No problems at all
detecting whatever I plug into it. The machine was built in 1998 and has a
376MHz Pentium II in it. Perhaps the machines you tried really _do_ have
processors that are too slow to run USB 2 cards. Unlikely, but possible.
W.