[ale] Large IDE hard drives

[Gary Maltzen]

I saw this (Aug 31) message and found it intriguing. I had already successfully installed a 36GB HDD with NT4 (after searching for a BIOS upgrade) but wanted to do it the "hard" way.

Note: some BIOS, like my original Pentium BIOS, will lock up if you install a drive > 32GB; in that case you need to get an updated BIOS flash for the system.

I purchased a 60GB drive and installed it in my (are you ready) 486/DX-100 running RH60 (with lots of updates).

I discovered that I ran into problems similar to Trent's problems when I tried using kernel 2.0.37 (from Tom's Root/Boot).

I finally reinstalled it as the slave (with a 26GB master). I'm running 2.2.17 kernel. The drive is partitioned thusly:

   hdb1 - /boot         (16033+ blocks)
   hdb2 - swap          (64260  blocks)
   hdb3 - extended   (59946547+ blocks)
   hdb5 - /            (538416  blocks)
   hdb6 - /tmp        (1052216  blocks)
   hdb7 - /usr        (2112516  blocks)
   hdb8 - /home      (56243533+ blocks)

I was able for format and mount the whole parition tree (under /mnt), then use

  ( cd / ; tar cf - bin boot etc ... ) | ( cd /mnt ; tar xf - )

to transfer the entire (13GB) contents of /dev/hda to /dev/hdb

Subsequent mounts, unmounts and fscks have gone without problem.

The only issue yet is to actually make it /dev/hda (the boot drive)


>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.
>
>Trent Chastain
>Beacon Electronics
>(404) 256-9640
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