[plug] BIOSes, >32Gig HDDs & Linux

Chris Caston caston at arach.net.au
Thu Jun 17 23:28:17 WST 2004


On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 23:16, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> I've freed up a 40Gig HDD from one of my PCs, and stuck it in my home 
> server for more archive space. However, the PC BIOS spat the dummy at it 
> until I added the jumper to "limit HDD to 32Gig". It's an old Celeron 
> 433MHz, and I guess the BIOS doesn't like drives bigger than that.
> 
> So I booted up the system, and Linux happily reports that, yes, it's a 
> 33.8Gig HDD - with a 39Gig partition on it! However, it DOES give I/O 
> errors when accessing parts of it - so I guess it isn't quite usable 
> as-is...
> 
> Is it possible to access the full size of this drive from within linux, 
> without the BIOS support? If so - how?
> Or do I have to either a) attempt to find a BIOS upgrade, or b) just 
> accept I now have a 32Gb HDD?
> 
> And on a rather related topic - the motherboard is a "Promedia" board, 
> but Googling on the model number only comes back with "Daewoo" boards. 
> Does anyone know if Promedia changed their name to Daewoo, or is this a 
> rather amazing coincidence?
> 
> Thanks...


I'm sure you'll soon get a response from Cameron if he hasn't already
beaten me to it but when you build the kernel ensure you enable
"Auto-geometry Resizing Support" in make menuconfig.

and "Put "hda=stroke" in 
 the kernel command line in LILO if that's what you are using.


> 
> --
> . Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ .
> : Web Systems Administrator      -           T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au :
> | IT Services                       -               Murdoch University |
>   >------------------- Member of the #SAS# & #CFC# --------------------<
> | On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of     /
> | course. But mostly evil, on the whole.                             /
>   \      -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters)                          /
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