usenet_spam@m16.demon.co.uk (spakka) wrote in alt.atheism

Elroy Willis <elo@airmail.net> wrote in message

I got the 2gig drive to load first try, just in case you were
curious...

When you enter the BIOS setup, is the drive correctly identified?

It's set for auto-detect right now, and it seems to recognize
the full drive, at least in LBA format. In CHS format, it only
seems to recognize 17,475 of the 84,966 available.

If so, does 'df' show any filesystem 100% full?

No.

Is the reported geometry correct? What happens when you print the
partition table? (Ignore the warning about large number of sectors).

It's okay to ignore that message? It tells me that the # of cylinders
is set to 5310, and that this is larger than 1024 and could cause
problems. I'm not sure what that means exactly...

I don't think that's the problem. See my other post I made
earlier this morning. Thanks for your help so far. The tech
I talked to at Maxtor said this drive should work just fine as a
primary Linux drive if setup properly, but I'm beginning to wonder...

stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote in alt.atheism

Elroy Willis <elo@airmail.net> wrote in alt.atheism;

stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote in alt.atheism

Elroy Willis <elo@airmail.net> wrote in alt.atheism;

<snip>

BTW, it seems that the trouble I had earlier with loading Perl and
Openoffice is because of disk space. For some reason, my whole
drive isn't being recognized. It's a brand new Maxtor Ultra ATA/133
40GB drive, but I think only 2GB is being recognized for some reason.

I tried to load an ISO of Debian Linux, and it got an out of space
error as well. It came with a bad sector scan utility that I ran, and
nothing abnormal came up, but at around 2GB into the load, it ran
out of space.

I'm not sure if I formatted the disk properly when I first got it,
or if maybe my BIOS is too old to recognize the whole drive or
what. Hmm...

Elroy, what's the motherboard and chipset? And what BIOS?

It's a Pentium II 300mhz with a Phoenix BIOS. I tried to find a BIOS
version but couldn't. While looking around in the BIOS setup utility,
I found a setting for "Large drive OS type" which I could change
between "DOS" and "Other", and it even had Unix listed under "Other,"
so I thought to myself "Yay, this is gonna fix the problem."

http://www.bitesizeinc.net/index.php/howto.Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery.27

Don't know if the above helps at all.

I was looking for the manufacturer and model number of your mobo.
Specifically, I wanted to see up to what size HD the MB would support.
I'm wondering if the age of the MB and chipset/bios is such the 40 Gig
HD is too big for it.

Here's a link to the motherboard specs:
http://h20015.www2.hp.com/hub_search/document.jhtml?lc=en&docName=bph05568
http://h20015.www2.hp.com/hub_search/document.jhtml?lc=en&docName=bph03925&prodId=pv8275&cc=us

The original computer came with an 8 gig drive which could quite
possibly be the problem. Maybe that was the maximum size the
BIOS can support without using LBA?

There was a checkbox during the Redhat install which was for
"Force LBA" which I didn't know whether to check or not, and quite
frankly, I think I might have checked it at least once during the
dozen or so times I tried to get Redhat to install onto the 40G
drive.

I'm seeming to recall 40 Gig was one such barrier. I do recall 64 was
one barrier.

Like I mentioned in another post, I ran across some people complaining
about not receiving an ATA card along with the hard drive in the box.
The article mentioned larger drives than 40G, such as 100 and 150G
drives, so I'm wondering if I need one of those cards to make the
drive function properly. I'm a bit confused at this point, since the
drive seems to be working okay as a secondary. I haven't hammered
it with a bunch of tasks yet, and maybe it'll fail for some reason, I
don't know...

If you are able to get the 2 Gig HD to work, then you're running into a
HD size barrier. I don't know if a bios upgrade would take care of it
of if you'll need to pick up an old Promise raid card to get around it.

I have no experience with Raid, except to kill bugs with. :)

There was a site where the data on the various HD size barriers could
be found, but darned if I can think of the proper terms for it to come up
in a search engine.

One thing I noticed which was interesting is that in the BIOS
settings, under the CHS format, the # of cylinders for the drive
is listed at 17,475. The heads is 16, and spt 63, which is the same
for the new drive, but according to my calculations, the 17,475
figures out to 8 megs, which was what the original hard drive was.

Like I said, I tried to use the user-defined setting and type in
the actual 84,966, but it wouldn't let me go beyond 4 characters
when I tried to type it in. I made sure to delete any spaces, etc,
but it just won't take a number larger than 4 digits, even though
it actually displays 5 digits (17475). I don't get it, but I'm
assuming that Linux isn't actually using CHS format anyway,
and is using the LBA mode, since I have it enabled in the BIOS.

Now to try to remember whether I actually clicked "Force LBA
mode" during the Redhat install. I do remember a warning message
saying that it could be dangerous to do so, and might cause boot
failure, but being pretty desperate at many points, I'm pretty sure
I tried that, at least once, but I can't say for sure... Oh well...

I'm also curious what the "Transfer Mode - Fast PIO 4" means,
and what the options are. I know for sure I didn't change that
setting, because I have no idea what it means.

Ah, the joys of new hardware and software...