[Gllug] 11 gig limit

[Rob Andrews]

[09-Oct-2001 12:23.41 (BST) / SteveC]
 > I've got an 80gig IDE drive reporting as 11gig to BIOS/fdisk etc here. I've
 > looked at the large disk howto which just says "there are no problems", and
 > hunted around the manufacturers site which just says "use this windows
 > patch" but I can't find much else. :-/
 > Any suggestions (Debian/potato)?

I had a bonkers problem with old BIOSen a few years back, trying to put a
12GB drive into a machine and finding the BIOS chop it at 8.1GB.

The kernel grabs all of the disk geometry stats straight from the disk,
overriding them with the details in the partition table if necessary (when
you see "hdX: [PTBL] ..." the geometry is forced in the partition table). So
what the BIOS sees should really matter. However, what kernel you use may
matter very much.

I have a 41.1GB IBM UDMA100 drive, which, despite being a very nippy drive,
had a few little mishaps. 2.2.x kernels would display unusual irregular
behaviour with the disk during partitioning, formatting and usage, resulting
in the contents being juggled about and no data being stored reliably. After
running fdisk over it, the BIOS reported it's size as 8GB. I despaired after
spending hours copying nearly 30GB of data onto it, only to find trash. You
really need kernel 2.4.x - notably for the 64-bit disk access. And, although
I can't say for sure, you may need the libc6 from a newer Debian. Haven't
confirmed this, however, so don't quote me on that ;)

Anyhow, don't rely on the drive until you've tested the contents. Generally,
I like to fill a few partitions in the upper are of the disk - try creating
a few filesystems in the upper 10GB of the disk and formatting them as ext2,
then copying lots of data into there and running "find . -type f -exec cat
{} > /dev/null\;" a few times. If this works, you should be okay.

If you're worried about moving to 2.4.x (if you haven't already), I suggest
the -acX patches right now.

HTH,
n.

-- 
nine      <e> rob at impure.org.uk <pgp> 0x8bb5c71e <w> http://impure.org.uk/
* only the good die young. the rest are forced to code perl for eternity *

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug