[ale] Large IDE hard drives

Bao Ha baoh at linuxwizardry.com
Mon Nov 6 11:33:25 EST 2000



I have an old Phoenix BIOS.  It speaks LBA, but shows
the drives as 8 Gig maximum.  LILO can access a
maximum of 133 Gig through LBA.  NT has a hard time
with this system.  W2k Advanced Server dies horribly
with a BSOD: inaccessible boot device.

Once boot-up, Linux has no trouble since it accesses
the drive directly and knows the full capacity.

I am also using the WD 45 Gig.  I don't think it makes
any differences.

Bao

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ale at ale.org [mailto:owner-ale at ale.org]On Behalf Of Brian J.
To: ale at ale.org
Dowd
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 10:14 AM
To: Bao Ha; ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Large IDE hard drives


I tried installing a master and slave (IBM 45 Gig drives)
on a Red Hat 7.0 system with an Award 4.51PG BIOS.
IBM describes how both drives need to be jumpered so that
they will each address no more than 32 Gigs with this BIOS.
This jumpering scheme did not
work at all if *both* drives were connected either with
the same cable or different ones. I removed the slave 45Gig
and replaced it with a 10Gig. The master 45Gig was *not*
jumpered to reduce the disk space to 32Gigs. They are now
hda (45Gigs) and hdd(10Gigs) and format perfectly.
Fsck has no problems with either drive. IBM does have a fix
available on their web site for this BIOS deficiency but I'm
tired of messing with hardware!

> I have not had a problem with a 45-Gig drive.  I am running
> Debian Stable (Potato).
>
> I did have a problem with NT4.  But the atapi.sys from SP4
> fixes it.
>
> Bao
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ale at ale.org [mailto:owner-ale at ale.org]On Behalf Of Gary
> Maltzen
> Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2000 4:19 PM
> To: TChastain at beaconmail.com
> Cc: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] Large IDE hard drives
>
> 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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> body.
>
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--
Brian J. Dowd
73, W1DOC



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