[Gllug] Debian installer and Disks > 137GB

[Doug Winter]

On Fri 17 Oct Darren Beale wrote:
> I'm putting together a machine with 2 x 200GB IDE drives and cfdisk is 
> only reporting that the machine has two 137GB disks, searching around I 
> see that this might be some sort of* hardware limitation although I'm 
> not sure.

I don't believe it could be a hardware limitation, although it could in
theory be a kernel problem - except you are using bf24, which happily
supports big disks afaik.

> I've made sure that the BIOS on the MoBo (Dell Poweredge 350 server) is 
> up to date and I've also tried opening a separate console window and 
> using fdisk to partition the disk instead, with the same issues. I'm not 
> sure if I should be looking to get a kernel patch, a newer mobo or what. 
> I've tried all of the install kernels, with bf24 being my default, with 
> the same results.

AIUI the linux kernel bypasses the BIOS for all disk related operations
as soon as it can, because BIOSes are so flakey.  Therefore I think your
issue is down to the disk, the controller or the kernel.

Something to be aware of is that the CHS values that fdisk picks up can
be a fantasy - obviously they are anyway, but they can be *wrong*.

In this case you could try inventing some CHS values that give you the
correct size.  You can change the CHS values on the disklabel in fdisk
expert mode.

I had a similar problem a few weeks ago (two identical disks destined to
be a mirrored pair, but one of them had different reported CHS values
from the other), and doing what I said above sorted it.  I guess it's
possible that plugging random CHS values in might break something
seriously, but I doubt it - caveat lector :)

HTH,

Doug.

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