[clug] Overriding the BIOS' impression of a disk
Andrew Pollock
andrew-clug at andrew.net.au
Tue Oct 28 17:58:44 EST 2003
Hi,
I've got an antediluvian motherboard that I recently discovered (the hard
way) couldn't handle a disk >32Gb
This is after a bought a 120G disk at the fair to reinstall it with. So I
bought a 40G disk on the weekend and set the jumper to limit the size to
32G and just wore the loss of 8G. Motherboard was happy, booted Linux, and
I was happy.
Until I booted the kernel and saw:
hda: Host Protected Area detected.
current capacity is 66055248 sectors (33820 MB)
native capacity is 78165360 sectors (40020 MB)
and this got me thinking about some of the kernel parameters, and I went
reading ide.txt in the kernel documentation and found:
Drives are normally found by auto-probing and/or examining the CMOS/BIOS
data.
For really weird situations, the apparent (fdisk) geometry can also be
specifiedon the kernel "command line" using LILO. The format of such
lines is:
hdx=cyls,heads,sects,wpcom,irq
or hdx=cdrom
where hdx can be any of hda through hdh
So this got me wondering as to whether I could jumper the 120G drive to
32G so the BIOS will boot it, and then append the real geometry to the
kernel and then I could have my cake and eat it?
Before I go pulling apart multiple machines *again* I thought I'd ask here
if anyone else has done this successfully?
TIA
Andrew
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