RE: [MLUG] 60Gb hdd problems?

["Nathan Odle" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Perhaps this will help...

In looking at the kernel source, you could just patch lba_capacity_is_ok()
so that it always returns 1, but that's pretty risky.  Better to actually
download the latest kernel in whichever stable series you need and
recompile.

-n8

>From the Linux Large-Disk HOW-TO:

12.1 IDE problems with 34+ GB disks

Drives larger than 33.8 GB will not work with kernels older than 2.2.14 /
2.3.21. The details are as follows. Suppose you bought a new IBM-DPTA-373420
disk with a capacity of 66835440 sectors (34.2 GB). Pre-2.3.21 kernels will
tell you that the size is 769*16*63 = 775152 sectors (0.4 GB), which is a
bit disappointing. And giving command line parameters hdc=4160,255,63
doesn't help at all - these are just ignored. What happens? The routine
idedisk_setup() retrieves the geometry reported by the disk (which is
16383/16/63) and overwrites what the user specified on the command line, so
that the user data is used only for the BIOS geometry. The routine
current_capacity() or idedisk_capacity() recomputes the cylinder number as
66835440/(16*63)=66305, but since this is stored in a short, it becomes 769.
Since lba_capacity_is_ok() destroyed id->cyls, every following call to it
will return false, so that the disk capacity becomes 769*16*63. For several
kernels a patch is available. A patch for 2.0.38 can be found at
ftp.kernel.org. A patch for 2.2.12 can be found at www.uwsg.indiana.edu
(some editing may be required to get rid of the html markup). The 2.2.14
kernels do support these disks. In the 2.3.* kernel series, there is support
for these disks since 2.3.21. One can also `solve' the problem in hardware
by using a jumper to clip the size to 33.8 GB. In many cases a BIOS upgrade
will be required if one wants to boot from the disk.

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