ide disks > 8.4gb
I have been reading several threads on two mailing lists about this
(and sumbitted to them). I have had some problems getting a 17.2GB
(16.8GB) maxtor to work and have run into alot of the old wives tails
here. I hope someone who knows the inerds of fdisk and lilo can answer
this correctly, and not just parrot old factoids.
My bios DOES report the correct size of the disk, thou not necessarly
the correct geomertry. From what I have read the early bios and OS
limits could only handle disks up to about 504mb. Then a translation
scheme was introduced that lied about the number of heads to allow more
cylinders. This along with the LBA mode gets us to 8.4GB. The most
recent bios's have an extended function via int13 to report and set the
LBA getting us beyond the 8.4gb limit. Windows 95 and 98 can use the
extented int13 function in the bios and have no problems fdisking and
booting on very large ide drives.
My problem was that the fdisk program on the slink resc1440 image only
saw the first 8.4 gb of my drive. The fact that this was a problem in
fdisk was proven by trying the partition routines from the stormix
distro cd which DID correctly see ALL of my hd and was able to
partition it. Once partitioned the install of debian slink via the
resc1440 disk and the cd proceded correctly. And the kernel does see
all of the disk. (df reports the correct size of the partition/fs
although the used+avail is < the reported size of the partition. I
assume this is due to the OS reserving some of the available space for
itself).
So my question is does the mythical 1024 cylinder limit still apply for
the partition containing the boot kernel? This limit no longer applies
to fdisk, or the bios. If lilo uses the bios, and knows about the
extended int13 function, then this limit SHOULD be history. If this
limit still applies then I have a ticking time bomb in my system, which
will fail to boot someday when a rebuild kernel is installed and it's
image crosses the 1024 cylinder boundary. My "/" partition is #3,
after a 2047mb first partiton for windows, and a 127mb swap partition.
(Actually somewhat larger partition sizes as fdisk rounds up to the
next cylinder).
===
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