[ale] rescue disk?

Eric Z. Ayers eric.ayers at mindspring.com
Fri Jul 28 19:50:56 EDT 2000



I don't know if there are any explicit problems with 60GB drives
explicitly, but the kernel that comes with 5.2 isn't that great about
recoginzing large hard drives, but one way around it is to specify a
geometry when  you boot:

linux hda=cylinders,heads,sectors

I used 16 for heads, 255 for sectors (or is it 64(?) I don't remember)

to get the cylinder value, take the LBA number and just divide by 16 and
divide again by the # of sectors.

Also, I'd just download the 'correct' resue images from
ftp.freesoftware.com.   I'll bet the RedHat 6.2 version will work well
for you.

LBA reading would be something like: 11718750 which is 60GB / 512
bytes/sector


11718750 / 16
732421
732421 / 64
11444 cylinders


try something like hda=11444,16,64

-Eric.

joshy writes:
 > 
 > this is a rather embarassing question...
 > 
 > 
 > I need to build a rescue disk for a RedHat 6.1 (Cartman) computer.  I
 > couldn't find a rescue.img in the 6.1 distribution so I downloaded
 > rescue.img from a 5.2 distribution and put it on a floppy using rawrite,
 > but the 5.2 install disk said it couldn't find a valid rescue.img on the
 > floppy.
 > 
 > 
 > You see, I got a new 60GB harddrive and my BIOS can't read it. I tried
 > Maxtor's MaxBlast software to trick the computer into reading more than
 > 32GB, but it blew away lilo, and I, um, neglected to create a custom 
 > rescue disk earlier. (i'll take my lashings now, thank you).  All I need
 > to do is to boot Linux so that I can reinstall lilo.
 > 
 > Of course, this won't help the bigger issue of getting Linux to see the
 > full 60GB drive. My BIOS hangs when I boot the drive in a normal
 > configuration and if I set the "limit cylinders" jumper it only sees a
 > 32GB drive. any ideas? is my only choice to get a new motherboard that can
 > handle large drives?
 > 
 > thanks,
 > - joshy
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > -- 
 > Then in the end the love you take
 >     is equal to the love you make
 > --
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