Re: big non-boot disks
usually yeah, or get the tech specs from the www site from the maker of
the drive.. the only barriers i've found with ide are 540(545?)MB 8GB and
32GB haven't encountered/read about problems with stuff inbetween those,
although i dont doubt there are some really broken bioses out there.
one of systems i built a few months ago with a 37GB ibm drive did not
detect teh drive in the bios, or if it did it didnt show me the geometry
of the drive it was just blank, but for some reason i was still able to
format and install/use it not only as a bootable drive(with a 6GB bootable
partition) but i could (apparently havent really tested it to its full
extent) access all 37GB of the drive.
and in another case, with a really old computer, the bios stopped
recognizing ANY drives at all, and yet when i booted a linux kernel from
floppy i could read/write/mount drives no problem. it must of bypassed
bios calls to detect the drives, as when i booted to dos and tried fdisk
it said 'no fixed disks present'.
moral of the stories i guess even if the bios can't see the drive right it
still might work :)
nate
On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Danny Heap wrote:
danny >I'm seeing advertisements for IDE drives with over 20 GB capacity. I
danny >realize that one of the problems with really large IDE drives has been
danny >that BIOS doesn't report the geometry properly.
danny >
danny >However, if I don't plan to install the drive with any bootable
danny >partitions (as a second slave drive, say), then won't the disk
danny >geometry be completely understood by the linux kernel, perhaps helped
danny >out by some boot parameters?
danny >
danny >Also, how do I discover the true disk geometry? Can I simply read
danny >what's printed on the drive?
danny >
danny >Some of the large drives I've seen advertised are Maxtor 20.4 GB,
danny >Seagate 28 GB, Maxtor 36 GB. And a scsi Seagate 50.1 GB.
danny >
danny >Thanks for any help
danny >Danny Heap
danny >danny@gibbs.med.utoronto.ca
danny >
danny >
danny >--
danny >Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null
danny >
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