Acer 3400LMI manual Hard drive, Ieee 1394 Firewire, Upgrading the drive

F8­x86_64 on the Acer Ferrari 3400LMi

vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img libata.ignore_hpa=1

3 Hard drive

No hassle what so ever, but my own reflection is that the standard hard drive does not match the “high end gear” profile of this laptop. When the laptop was released 120 MB drives was the latest of the greatest and 100MB drives were off the shelf goods in most stores. However, a smaller drive would have been ok at a higher speed, at least 5400rpm.

3.1 Upgrading the drive

I am addicted to VMware and want extra of everything, size, speed, RAM, etc. Thus, I have replaced the original Hitachi Travelstar 80 GB (4200rpm) drive with a Seagate Momentus 160 GB (5400rpm, ATA/ATAPI­6, ST9160821A). What a difference! The higher speed, as well as the higher storage density, pays off in far better performance. Operating temperature is the same as for the original drive. According to the smartmontools it runs at 40­48 °C during normal load with peaks above 50 °C during heavy load. A highly recommended upgrade!

Depending on the hardware you might notice a strange disk size of your new drive. If you just plan to copy your existing installation to the new drive you need the following two lines in your /etc/modprobe.conf file:

alias scsi_hostadapter libata options libata ignore_hpa=1

If you plan on installing a fresh system on the new drive take a look in the

2 Installation section above. During the installation the proper entries are written to /etc/modprobe.conf.

4 IEEE 1394 Firewire

With FC5 and later there should not be any problems with the IEEE 1394 Firewire support. For me it works just as smooth as the USB support. If you are running kernel version 2.6.14 or later you may skip this section, unless you have specific interest in tweaking you Firewire settings.

A new alternative driver stack for Firewire support (a.k.a Juju) was introduced as experimental in kernel version 2.6.22. In Fedoras kernel configuration 2.6.23.9­85.fc8 the new IEEE1394 driver stack replaces the old drivers. The rest of this section deals with the old driver stack, i.e before Fedora kernel 2.6.23.9­85.fc8. For the most recent information please refer to http://www.linux1394.org.

However, on systems with kernel version 2.6.13 or earlier some might experience problems with the Firewire support due to different default values used in the kernel module. First a short description of the potential problems.

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