Andries Brouwer wrote:
> A larger than 33.8 GB disks may cause an old BIOS to hang at
> boot time. One can place a jumper to make the disk appear 33.8 GB,
> and then booting is succesful, but access to sector 66055248 and above
> yields I/O errors.
Except if you're blessed with a GA-686LX board with an ancient AWARD
BIOS and a Maxtor 93652U8 (~36 GB). That combination quite stubbornly
refused any attempt to get it to boot. The Maxtor utilities even
claimed that the drive had no size limitation jumper. The only remedy
in this case was to disable the Maxtor drive in the BIOS, and to boot
from a smaller hard disk. A few noteworthy details:
- only recent kernels will properly detect drives disabled in the BIOS
- you can still use the disabled drive as hda - the BIOS simply ignores
it and makes the second one its 0x80 drive, while Linux sees both
drives and names them in the right order. Make sure your boot loader
knows of this arrangement, though.
- all this does not work if there is no other hard disk, e.g. when
trying to boot from a floppy disk instead, because the IDE subsystem
is not properly initialized in this case, and Linux fails to detect
the drive. (However, even connecting a hard disk with only the IDE
interface intact but the actual storage part defective had the
desired effect of convincing the BIOS to initialize the IDE subsystem.)
Well, I bought that drive specifically to explore problems at the 34 GB
boundary, so this is actually a success story :-)
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH werner.almesberger@ica.epfl.ch / /_IN_N_032__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 23 2000 - 21:00:13 EST