I have an old Cobalt Raq 2 and Raq 3. They have small hard drives.
Can I replace it with like a 320gb or larger?
How would I restore the OS to the new drive?
Could I image the small HD on my mac (putting in an external case) and then put the new drive in the external case and blast the image back on it?
I like these as they are easy to use for my clients to get files from me as needed. They are quiet and just work..
Assuming the Bios will recognized a disk larger 8GB or 127GB and you can find an IDE drive that size, it should work. Even if you disk is larger you'll just be limited to the Bios limit which may be okay if you can't update it. You will need to reinstall the master boot record on the disk as well.
BTW, kudos to keeping those running. I haven't played with a Raq2 in nearly ten years and eight for the Raq3.
If I recall correctly the Cobalt Raqs used IDE drives. Those were fun little boxes, back in the day. I think a better project would be to get those systems running on new hardware.
If you did find drives that worked, you'd have an interesting time getting the OS on there. Are they still supported? I bet there are security holes that haven't been patched on those. No fault of yours, of course! I think they lost support many years ago.
I'd look into something like a dual core Atom 'nettop' with large drives as a replacement. Less than $500 in hardware and it'll draw less than 50 watts. Plus you can migrate the services off at your leisure.
This is, of course, assuming that they aren't greatly dependent on the custom admin interface.
If you really are determined to get new drives in there, here is one resource: http://www.cobaltiso.com/
I have a 250GB Maxtor IDE drive in my Raq2+ running NetBSD 4.0 it works perfectly:
wd0 at atabus0 drive 0: wd0: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing wd0: 232 GB, 484521 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 488397168 sectors wd0: 32-bit data port wd0: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133) wd0(viaide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, Ultra-DMA mode 2 (Ultra/33) (using DMA)
