Drive Size Limit - Where?

[lxa2xjj]

Hi all,

I just put a 500gb ide drive in a sarge3.1 server. Kernel version is 2.4. The mother board is an ASUS about 5 years old.

fdisk reports the drive as:

Disk /dev/hdc: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 266305 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

Which seems to work out to 137gb not 500gb.

Is this a limitation of my motherboard hardware, the bios, the kernel or something related to fdisk or the debian version 3.1.? Or what tests can I run to figure out what needs to be upgraded... (I know, probably everything)

I was hoping to quickly copy data off of a raid mirror that is running on this box which is made from 120gb drives.... one of the drives is reporting errors occasionally.


-John

[devils casper]

Hi and Welcome !

Post the complete output of fdisk -l and df -h commands.

fdisk -l
df -h

[lxa2xjj]

Gald to meet you casper!

The two commands are not much help. fdisk -l reports nothing (maybe normal behavior for this version?). And df does not show the new drive because I have not yet made a partition on it. Was gunshy about doing so because fdisk seems to report wrong size.

Output from commands:

willow:~#
willow:~# fdisk -l
willow:~# fdisk /dev/hdc
Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel
Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only,
until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.


The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 266305.
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: 16 heads, 63 sectors, 266305 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

Command (m for help): q

willow:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 11G 3.7G 7.1G 35% /
/dev/md1 113G 104G 4.5G 96% /home
willow:~#
willow:~#

Thanks for your input!

-John

[iwanabeguru]

i bet to the motherboard, it's a prety old one for such a new device.
maybe a bios upgrade will help.

or somehow you can manage to see the entire space with tricks
i read somwhere that linux can manage drives without the bios, but iám not sure

[HROAdmin26]

HW Limit

Real solution - you need an IDE controller that supports 48 bit logical block addressing (LBA) instead of the one you have now (on your motherboard) - limited to 32 bit.

Solution:

Due to BIOS limitations as well as those unique to Windows®, partitioning and formatting drives larger than 137 Gigabytes without proper driver or controller support will result in data loss when storing data to the drive beyond the 137 GB Barrier.

In order for you system to recognize more than 137 GB you will need to utilize one of the following recommended solutions:

1. If you have a motherboard that has a Intel chipset (810, 810E, 810E2, 815, 815, 815E, 815EP, 815P, 820, 820E, 830M, 830MP, 830MG, 840, 845, 850, or 860) please visit Intel's web site and download the Intel Application Accelerator. Intel's Application Accelerator supports the full capacity of drives larger than 137 GB.
2. If you do not have a motherboard that has a Intel chipset then it is recommended that you purchase an Ultra ATA 133 PCI card that supports 48 bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA). You can purchase the Maxtor Ultra ATA 133 PCI Card, which supports drives that are larger than 137 GB, directly from us or your local distributor.

[lxa2xjj]

Thanks for the info and suggestions.

Yes, I have confirmed that the motherboard is the limit at 137gig.

I downloaded a new BIOS from the ASUS website that said it provided access of drives larger than 32gig. This did nothing to fix the problem. I guess there was a previous limit at this point that some versions of this motherboard were limited to.

I've decided to deep six the box and replace the entire sarge 3.1 server with newer hardware, the 500gig drive and debian etch 4.0.

Thanks again !

John