New Information -- Re: Answer (Re: Cylinder limits jumper for drives over 32GB)

From: John Anthony Kazos Jr. (jkazos@vt.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 01 2000 - 20:52:46 EST


Some of you are right. Some of you are wrong. Some of you are right in
some circumstances. Irrespective of that...

I have a Maxtor 40G (54098U8) and an M748LMRT mainboard. My BIOS locks up
on autodetecting the drive. I followed the instructions in the manual for
the drive and manually set the recommended values (16383/16/63) that were
printed on the drive. In the BIOS setup, it now says the drive is around
8G. I restart, and I look above the LILO prompt. The BIOS spits out the
numbers I put in (16383/16/63) but next to it correctly states that the
drive has 40981M. I boot into Linux and it recognizes that it is over
32G. However, I can't get the full capacity. I run fdisk and it gives the
drive 4982/255/63 (about 38G). If I increase the cylinder count to the
appropriate drive size, I get buku sector-not-found errors on mk32fs. If
I set the drive in the BIOS to be 37500(something around there)/32/63,
and set fdisk to the same data, it works fine. However, in both cases,
where it fails and where it does not, the data are reset upon reboot and
my new full-disk partition now is larger than the drive. I finally gave
up and am using only 38G of it (formatted, 37G). So, obviously, Linux
appropriately is ignoring what the BIOS says, but it still is not doing
it correctly.

(If anyone wants detailed BIOS information, I'll email it. I was too
lazy to reboot and write it down while composing this mail.)

Any ideas?

As a side note, does anyone know how to mount root as read-only (for
the purpose of moving the root partition from one drive to another).
I've tried '-o remount,ro' and the same while under 'linux single';
in the first case it doesn't work (init, among other things, is
still using the partition) and in the second case fails without even
an error message. (I hate when computers ignore me. It makes me
recognize my status of partner to the computer and slave to reality.)
I have asked this on linux-admin and linux-config, and wanted to get
another set of brains on it. And it doesn't count as OT unless it's
the main message. :P

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 07 2000 - 21:00:09 EST