large disks in old machines

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 12:04:27PM +1000, Rob Shugg wrote:
> 
> Hey
> I am setting up some file servers on old P2's and have come across some
> problems.
> 
> the disk is a Seagate Barracuda 80G.
> initially i had no joy on the pentium 2 so I put it in my newer P3 and it
> detected ok. I then tried fdisk but it complained about the partition table
> being missing. I had to use sfdisk to write a partition table and I had to
> manually set the C,H,S values as the kernel had got it wrong. I then made a
> reiserfs and mounted it ok.

I've put an 80G disk in a machine whose bios just hung when trying to detect
it. The first thing I tried was to leave it out of the BIOS (say None rather
than Auto). That worked and Linux correctly detected it. It worked fine.

What I also did was fill in the wrong size of the disk in the BIOS (was a
bit tricky since the BIOS kept hanging if I pressed the wrong key). I think
I did 16383/254/16. The BIOS then booted, linux got the correct size and I
got UDMA support to boot :).

Oh yeah, don't force the C,H,S. The kernel is almost always right if it
determined the size properly. If the BIOS didn't put the drive into LBA
mode, forcing the C,H,S may leave you unable to access the disk properly.

> I then tried to copy about 20G over to it. I got a few IDE timeouts and CRC
> errors doing this. So then I put it on an 80 wire ide cable, made a new fs
> and repeated the copy with no errors.

That's wierd.

> That was on a Mandrake 8.1 box. the fileserver is Debian woody, I wanted to
> mount this disk on /home in that box.
> I had to put the "limit drive capacity to 30G" jumper in in order to get the
> bios to detect it. that was fine. The trouble is it wont mount the
> filesystem.
> I get page full of errors ending in something like "bad filesystem" This box
> supports reiserfs. I thought this might be a version problem for reiserfs
> between the debian and MDK systems. 

Careful with that jumper. It might actually cap the size of the drive,
making it somewhat useless if you want to use the whole disk. I think you
might need that tricky software to then use the whole disk. Best leave it
off.

> I then tried to create a ext3 fs on the debian box but this produced a stack
> of CRC errors and IDE resets. These errors looked similar to ones that were
> fixed with the 80 wire cable so I thought i would try that. This was not
> possible because the cable I have has 39 pins (one blank for orientation)
> and my motherboard has the full 40 pins.

> Questions:
> has anyone else experienced this or do I have a dud disk?
> do i need to put a PCI IDE card in the P2 to support the new disk?
> do all 80 wire cables have 39 pins?

I've had similar stuff with a Western Digital. Not telling the BIOS about it
was certainly the quick fix. Alternativly, lying about the size may work
too. That jumper and overriding the C,H,S seems certainly not the wat to go.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog at svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that can do binary
> arithmetic and those that can't.