[Gllug] small hard disk problem

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 23:34 +0100, Minty wrote:
> On 10/4/05, Kurt Goodliff <kurt at lokdar.co.uk> wrote:

>   Support up to 137GB Big drive with LBA addressing
> 
> Which is odd, given I'm only seeing 137Gb on my new 200Gb disk!
> 
> Maybe I need a more recent kernel?

Or possibly more recent hardware....

The 137Gb limit is caused by the 28-bit LBA ATA addressing scheme
running out of steam. The ATA spec provided 28 bits of address data,
which gives you a maximum of 268,435,456 512 byte sectors, which is
137Gb (marketspeak Gb - it's 128 GiB). To access capacity on a single
ATA disk beyone the 128GiB limit you need a system that supports 48-bit
LBA, which is part of the ATA/ATAPI-6 spec.

In your specific case I think this will mean you'll need a kernel with a
driver that supports the 48 bit addressing mode, and hardware to do it.
AFAIK linux IDE drivers talk to the controller directly, not through the
BIOS, so I *think* your system BIOS shouldn't matter, but the IDE
controller (usually part of the chipset) will. That seems to be borne
out by the specs you quote for the innovision controller, which looks
like it only supports 28-bit LBA, so is useless for disks larger than
128GiB. So my guess is you need an either an external IDE controller
that supports 48 bit addressing, or a new motherboard (or SCSI :-)).

HTH,

Mike.

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