On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Chris Green wrote:
> I would tentatively suggest the following procedure for getting
> Linux reliably on to your hard drive and being able to use all of it:
>
> *) Check that the BIOS is the most up-to-date revision for your
> motherboard -- you can check Intel Motherboards at:
>
> http://developer.intel.com/design/motherbd/genbios.htm
I haven't figured out which motherboard I have yet (the documentation
isn't that specific and I couldn't see an ID on the motherboard itself
without unplugging things), but the machines are less than a month old
and should at least have a very recent version. Read on.
> *) Check that the BIOS is set to use LBA for this drive
Yep. And it lists is as a ~14 GB drive.
> *) Using the linux install disk, look at the boot-up messages. You should
> get a message like:
>
> hda: WDC AC36400L, 6149MB w/256kB Cache, CHS=784/255/63, UDMA
I get
............. 13783MB .............. CHS=1024/255/63, UDMA
i.e. both the BIOS and Linux are at some level aware that it is a
big disk. Running fdisk agrees with this CHS structure. Printing
the current partition table from the expert and regular menus gives:
Expert command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1024 cylinders
Nr AF Hd Sec Cyl Hd Sec Cyl Start Size ID
1 00 1 1 0 254 63 32 63 530082 82
2 80 0 1 33 254 63 163 530145 2104515 83
3 00 0 1 164 254 63 1023 263466013815900 83
4 00 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 00
Expert command (m for help): r
Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1024 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 1 1 33 265041 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda2 * 34 34 164 1052257+ 83 Linux native
/dev/hda3 165 165 1024 6907950 83 Linux native
i.e. the expert sizes seem great, but the units listed for cylinder
size make it all come out to being about half used.
So I'm not confident of how to proceed; the various examples you
listed (omitted here) involve Linux thinking there are more than
1024 cylinders. Naively it seems that I might want to double the
number of cylinders, but I'm still trying to sort out whether I
need to tell fdisk, LILO, the kernel, all of them, etc., and what
the prescription is for deciding how many cylinders to tell it to
use, etc.
Thanks for everyone's help.
Stephen