> Hi!
>
> My previous posting is for such case like "Accessing Huge Disks When the
> BIOS Can't".
Yes, I agree that where the BIOS is unable to access the large disk, then
this is often the only recourse. HOWEVER, the first thing you should do in
this case is check whether a FLASH BIOS upgrade for your motherboard
exists (Intel are very good at providing up-to-date BIOS upgrades; it goes
without saying, though, that you should carefully verify that the BIOS you
download and install exactly matches your motherboard model). Where the
BIOS is not the problem, there are other possible solutions which should
be tried first as they are almost guaranteed to be safe.
As for my problem, it is not directly relevant to the original thread as
it is related more to dual-use of a particular drive with NT and Linux
than to access to large drives in general. It appears that service pack 3
for NT has a serious problem formatting Seagate Medallist drives (whether
this is affected by the C/H/S configuration the drive thinks it has is
not clear). The base NT install however, shows no such problem -- so the
work-around in this case was to format NT partitions *before* upgrading to
service pack 3.
Cheers,
Chris.
> I should mention it before. I'm sorry.
>
>
> P.S. This is from HOWTO(HOWTO/mini/LILO).
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> DooKee Cho/MS352 FERMILAB P.O. BOX 500 Batavia IL 60510-0500
> dkcho@fnal.gov/
>
>
> On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Chris Green wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, DooKee Cho wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > Try
> > >
> > > append = "hd=2100,16,63" # hd=cylinders,heads,sectors
> > >
> >
> >
> > > You should change cylinders, heads, sectors for your Hard Disk.
> >
> > You *really* need to know what you're doing if you're going to try this,
> > especially if you have data already on the disk, or you have partitions
> > you wish to use with (eg) Windows NT. I would suggest you read the HOWTO
> > document referenced by a previous posting to this list before considering
> > anything as drastic as telling the hard drive itself that it has a
> > different number of cylinders, heads and sectors. This can work, but can
> > also screw up *really* badly (I had a nasty experience with a medallist
> > 8.6GB drive on a dual-boot machine I was trying to configure). My problem
> > was fixed by using lba, a 2.0.35 kernel and NT pre-service pack 3, if
> > anyone is interested.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Chris.
> >
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > DK
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > DooKee Cho/MS352 FERMILAB P.O. BOX 500 Batavia IL 60510-0500
> > > dkcho@fnal.gov/
> > >
> > >
> > > On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Stephen Bailey wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > > Hi.
> > > >
> > > > We recently bought two Gateway 2000 E-4200 machines with
> > > > 128 MB RAM and 14.4 MB Ultra ATA drives. After installing
> > > > FNAL Linux 5.0.2, I noticed that only ~7 Gb of disk space
> > > > was formated (as reported by df, or looking at the partition
> > > > table with fdisk), and free only reports 64 Mb of memory.
> > > > When rebooting, the BIOS reports 128 Mb RAM and Gateway's
> > > > factory tests found 128 Mb. To confirm the hard drive size,
> > > > I tried booting with a floppy to DOS, and using DOS's fdisk
> > > > to look at the partitions. It reported a ~13.5 Gb disk, but
> > > > listed the partitions as being the size that Linux thinks they
> > > > are with no direct mention of where the missing space is. Curiously,
> > > > there was a "usage" column with numbers like 49% for a 6 Gb
> > > > partition and 7% for a 1 Gb partition. Those numbers do not
> > > > correspond to the amount of data on those disks. i.e. it appears
> > > > that the ext2 formatting was extremely inefficient in using
> > > > the space on these drives.
> > > >
> > > > Does anyone have experience with either of these problems, or
> > > > can anyone point me to the appropriate documentation/resources
> > > > to help me get the full usage of the memory and disk space in
> > > > these machines?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks.
> > > >
> > > > Stephen Bailey
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> >
> > --
> > Chris Green. HEP, Purdue University. CDF SVXII project.
> > Based at Fermilab. MAIL greenc@fnal.gov; PHONE (630) 840-2308
> >
> >
> >
>
-- Chris Green. HEP, Purdue University. CDF SVXII project. Based at Fermilab. MAIL greenc@fnal.gov; PHONE (630) 840-2308