[ale] Large IDE hard drives

[D. Alan Stewart]

> Has anyone had experience installing large IDE hard drives (32-80 GB) under 
> linux? I have tried several different kernel versions, and different 
> distributions. I can usually get the drives formatted and mounted fine, but 
> fsck always seems to have trouble on the drive near the end. Would a different 
> file system other than ext2 work better? The drives are not going to be root, 
> simply extra storage.

I've had a few problems, but not ones you've described. First time was with a 
Maxtor 40GB drive. I created one large file system on it with no problems. 
However, when I tried to >20GB of data to it, boom! The file system was 
corrupted. At that time I could not fool with it, so I put the drive in a Windows 
machine. I've got a 30GB Maxtor in a RH 6.2 system right now. It did about 
the same thing when it got up to about 67% full. Lost everything. Since then 
we've found a report that there are problems with large Maxtor disks being on 
the same IDE cable with a non-Maxtor device. There was a slave CDROM 
drive on the same cable with this drive. We moved the CDROM and re-
created the file system. I wrote a script that filled the file system with copies 
of a file, performing a cmp on each copy. This was successful, so I think 
we're okay now.

D. Alan Stewart
Layton Graphics, Inc.
155 Woolco Dr.
Marietta, GA 30062
Voice: 770/973-4312
Fax: 800/367-8192
FTP: ftp.layton-graphics.com
WWW: www.layton-graphics.com

Unix is not just an operating system, it also teaches you to read.
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