I have encountered some really strange oddities with
my two-year-old FUJITSU MPB3032ATU 3,2Gb ide-drive.
Until yesterday I did not bother about the drive
at all -- it simply worked. It was partitioned
for use with W98 (1 GB) and Linux (2GB) and worked
fine with both.
Then I bought a new drive and though formatting
my old drive and making it use ext2fs would be a good
idea... 8-)
First of all, the kernel-messages and an "hdparm"
output:
Kernel? Which version?
==> Kernel:
> hdc: FUJITSU MPB3032ATU, ATA DISK drive
> hdc: FUJITSU MPB3032ATU, 2014MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=4092/16/63, (U)DMA
As you can see, the drive does not get recognised correctly.
The CHS should be more like 6704/15/63 (as printed on top of the
drive and entered as BIOS/CMOS values) to get 3,2Gb
-- with 4092/16/63 it only gets 2Gb.
This disk has jumpers.
The default is 6704/15/63 but you can jumper it to 4092/16/63,
as you probably did. The jumper settings are:
(default master)
1..
122
(clipped master)
1.2
1.2
Due to this, I cannot use (Linux)"fdisk" to partition the drive
correctly. It refuses to accept my "false" values for the
partition edges.
Not so pessimistic. You can (i) change the jumpers, or (ii) give the
kernel explicit boot parameters, or (iii) give fdisk explicit geometry
parameters.
Now comes the tricky part: when I use (win98)"fdisk", I can
make one big "fat32"-3,2Gb-partition, the program seems to take the
BIOS values and not the values the drive is perhaps reporting.
After formatting, it seems that everything is fine.
When I now start Linux the drive still does not get
recognised correctly but I can use it to the full 3,2GB. I
tried to write 32 100Mb files to it and succeeded.
How do you start Linux? (From Windows? From a cold machine?)
What are the kernel boot messages? (dmesg | grep hdc)
Btw: when I try to read any of the 12 files that lie behind
the 2Gb barrier, Win98 fails badly, e.g. completly crashes
the machine.
Ok, I now have the following situation: a drive that was
partitioned and formatted with Win98-tools fails with
Win98 but can be completely used with Linux (fat32 formatted),
even if Linux fails to correctly recognize it.
Any ideas of how to solve the problem?
As mentioned above, you can easily avoid problems, in several ways.
In order to understand all details of what happens, we would need
some more information.
(And when you give hdparm output, give both hdparm -i and hdparm -I;
in some kernel versions the kernel itself fiddles with the hdparm -i
report, so that it no longer represents what the disk said.)
Andries
-
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/