[Gllug] small hard disk problem

[Kurt Goodliff]

Minty wrote:

>Small problem with new harddrive [1].  It should be 200Gb, but it's
>only showing 137.4Gb.
>
>  fdisk /dev/hdb1
>
>shows this size.
>
>having created a single primary partition from/to the suggested values
>(1/17753), and formated with
>
>  mke2fs -j /dev/hdb1
>
>and mounted the disk, df -m shows
>
>  129011 1M-blocks, 33 Used, 122426 Available
>
>So, have I been sent a bad drive, or have I hit some bios limitation? 
>Or is there some trick to making the remaining ~60Gb appear?
>
>thoughts?
>
>[1] Seagate ST3200826A Barracuda 200GB 7200RPM ATA/100 8MB Cache - OEM
>http://tinyurl.com/ad5b7
>  
>
How old is the machine you installing the disk into?
I've had similar problems with installing large disks into older machine 
where the bios is limited. Easiest way around
it is to install a seperate IDE controller (I'm using a Innovision EIO 
AP1680 PCI ATA133 RAID (RAID 0 1) 
Controller Card, which is rubbish at raiding things but costs about £12 
and gives you two additional IDE ports
running at 133 which I'm guessing you current IDE ports don't do), this 
is assuming that you
don't need to boot off this disk (Can be done though).

Another option is to check that there isn't a BIOS update for the 
motherboard your working with, some manufacturers have
been known to release updates that fix large disk support issues.

or get a new motherboard   : P .. you have a reasonable excuse now.

Hope this helped.

Cheers

Kurt
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