Re: maximum hard drive limitations?
On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 02:18:38AM +1100, Drew Parsons wrote:
> This question isn't strictly Linux, but I hope you'll be kind :)
>
> I have a Toshiba 490CDT model, which comes with a 3.8GB harddrive, and the
> Toshiba docs seem to be saying that the maximum drive that can put in the
> computer is 6GB.
You might have problems booting off >6GB, if the limit is the BIOS.
Usually you can't boot off >7GB (except with LBA32). This isn't a problem.
Just make /boot early on the drive. AFAIK, laptop IDE is the same as
regular IDE, so there should be no reason why you can't address the same
number of sectors as you can there (once linux is booted and controlling the
IDE controller directly).
However, all I've done is to say that I can't think of any good reason why
there should be a 6GB limit. Borrow somebody's >6GB drive, and see if it
works. (i.e. boot off it, or (safer for the drive's data) boot from a
rescue floppy and dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/zero bs=1024k, and see how many
blocks it transfers. (1024k = 1MB, so the block count will be MB.) Do
this, rather than df or cat /proc/partitions, because this makes sure you
can actually read out that far on the disk. Running badblocks might be a
good idea too.
--
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)
"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE
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