Re: Using disks > 8GB

[Adam Rice <wysiwyg@glympton.airtime.co.uk>]

Quoting Lance Heller (mephisto@pulse.com):
> 
> I've recently installed a Maxtor 90845D4 8.4GB EIDE disk as the second
> disk in an old standby intel slink system I use.  I've run into 2 
> problems:
> 
> 1.  The system does not see past 8GB.  This is not a big deal
>     but it would be nice to access the complete disk.  How can
>     this be done??

I suspect this is just a result of the discrepancy between GB as used by
disk drive manufacturers (=1000*1000*1000 bytes) and real GB as used by
Linux and everyone else (=1024*1024*1024 bytes). Annoying, but unless
someone successfully sues them for misrepresentation, unlikely to go away.

> 2.  The problem system is an old pentium running Award bios 4.5.  
>     Attempts to boot an installed system from HD with Lilo have failed, 
>     boot floppies however succeed.  Boots fail shortly after finding, 
>     and correctly reporting, the system disks, with a kernel panic as it
>     attempts to seek beyond the end of media.  I'm attempting to 
>     boot with a minimal system from the first disk partition, starting
>     at cylinder 0, and believe I'm below the 1024 cylinder limit.  
> 
>     Maxtor provides EZ-BIOS with their disk as a work around for systems
>     having an older bios.  Linux does not appear to use this feature.  
>     E.g., after loading EZ-BIOS and completing the install, attempts to
>     boot the system using the boot floppy made during the install will
>     only succeed if EZ-BIOS is not loaded.  If EZ-BIOS is loaded and a
>     rescue floppy booted it is possible to mount the filesystems but
>     attempts to read or write the files fail.  The same process succeeds
>     if EZ-BIOS is not loaded.  
> 
>     Any help or suggestions you may be able to provide will be
>     greatly appreciated.

Odd. You could try using loadlin if you have DOS on the computer.

-- 
Adam Rice -- wysiwyg@glympton.airtime.co.uk -- Blackburn, Lancashire, England