Re: hard disk gives trouble on change of size
On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 12:53:28PM -0500, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> I have a 160G hard disk. I had installed it in a mobile rack, and used
> it on a vary old machine that couldn't talk to hard disks of more than
> 131GB (I think that's a power of two). I partitioned all it could
> see of the disk (only 131GB, of course) as a single partition and used
> it without trouble as a backup drive for years.
>
> Being in a mobile rack, I also used it on a machine that does recognise
> larger drives.
>
> Now one of my machines (called lovesong) currently boots from ab 80GB
TYPO: an
> hard disk that is slowly failing. Yesterday came the time to reorganise my
> deployment of hard disks. I plan to replace the 80GB failing drive with
> the 160GB drive mentioned above. The first step would seem to be to
> copy my existing sarge to it after appropriate partitioning:
>
> This new machine with the failing drive has no problem reading and
> writing the existing 131Gb partition. fdisk recognises it as being a
> 16oGB drive. fdisk happily created two new partitions at the end of
> the drive. They passed a bad-block check and an ext3 file system. I
TYPO:
the drive. They passed a bad-block check while creating an ext3
file system. I
> copied my existing / partition from the old, failing drive using rsync,
> adjusted lilo.conf to be able to boot the new sarge as well as the old,
> and adjusted the new drive's /etc/fstab to recognise itself as
> containing the / partition.
>
> When I rebooted, I was astonished how *slowly* it booted. During a lilo
> boot, it writes a series of dots on the screen. I'm used to them
> appearing and flashing off the screen faster than I can quite see them.
> But when booting from the new drive at /dev/hdc4, they appeared at about
> one per second -- about the same speed I'd expect from a *very* slow
> floppy drive.
>
> And after the dots finished appearing, it did nothing at all.
> Presumably it had not succeeded in loading a working kernel.
>
> Now I remember seeing one message that I ignored some time through the
> process -- a warning that the kernel's drive geometry differed from the
> BIOS's. I'm not sure what system component produced this message, nor
> its exact text. But I'm so accustomed to the artificiality of drive
> geometries that I ignored it.
>
> fdisk says:
>
> lovesong:/farhome/hendrik# fdisk /dev/hdc
>
> The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 310101.
> There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
> 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
> (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
>
> Command (m for help): p
>
> Disk /dev/hdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
> 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 310101 cylinders
> Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
>
> Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/hdc1 1 266305 134217688+ 83 Linux
> /dev/hdc3 266306 288203 11036592 83 Linux
> /dev/hdc4 288204 310101 11036592 83 Linux
>
> Command (m for help):
>
>
> Could its use as a small drive have poisoned it for use as a large one?
> I've never noticed any lack of speed in the past, certianly not a factor
> of a hundred or so slowdown over normal disk behaviour.
>
> Is the sarge lilo so old that it cannot handle drives with more than
> 131GB or boot partitions after the first 1024 cymlinders?
>
> -- hendrik
>
>
>
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