Re: Large Harddrive Problems
Paul Rightley <pright@lanl.gov> writes:
>I just bought a new Maxtor 3.5G drive on which I am going to put Debian 1.2 at
>home (I already have Debian at work). My motherboard at home is from early-mid
>1995 and supports a Pentium 120. The Award BIOS (which definitely supports
>LBA) detects the new Maxtor and gives the correct settings, but states that the
>size of the drive is something like 1.395G. When I run fdisk from the Debian
>1.2 floppies, it sees all 3.5G of the drive, but when I start to initialize
>file systems I get large numbers of errors (don't remember the exact error).
>The way I have it set up now, I have a 1G partition at the beginning of the
>drive for W95. If I try to give the rest of the drive to W95 in another
>partition, it too has errors upon formatting (but its fdisk also sees it as a
>3.5G drive).
Don't trust your BIOS in dealing with the Maxtor drives. I have a 2.7 gig
from them, which *seemed* to partition fine under Win 95 and Debian with
just my (decidedly ancient) BIOS's settings, but actually ended up
_very_ corrupted. What worked for me is to actually install Maxtor's
software, and partition via their instructions (don't have the docs with me
at current, but it's pretty straightforward). I checked it with
PartitionMagic and fdisk, and everything seemed happy after formatting and
installing Debian via the bootdisks. Another word to the wise.. don't let
LILO overwrite your MBR after doing this, as that's where the Maxtor
software likes to live. Still, they seem to coexist quite happily (at least
for the last few months on my machine).
Liane Praza
prazal@cs.purdue.edu
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