🚀 go-pugleaf

> Subject:      Re: 12 gig Quantum T-Rex Bigfoot Ultra ATA EIDE drive!!
> From:         NOSPAM@rembrandt.intur.net (Phil Howard)
> Date:         1998/01/12
> Message-ID:   <69dr5i$8kc$1@cezanne.intur.net>
> 
> 
> On Sun, 11 Jan 1998 22:07:10 -0800 Stv (stv@globalserve.net) wrote:
> 
> | How would One be able FDISK a HD this big?
> 
> Get an FDISK program that knows how to handle it.  The ones that come with
> Linux will work (they work on the 23 gig SCSI monster drives).  You can
> probably do this with NT, too.  Beware, however, that the BIOS simply
> cannot address more than 16777216 sectors no matter how you translate or
> map the addressing, so the 8 gig limit for BIOS/DOS/Win3.1/Win95 is one
> you can't around without some big software tricks that bypass BIOS entirely.
> It might be possible for some TSR/DLL/pseudo-drive to emulate 2 drives out
> of this big one and that could let things work.  Otherwise this is a drive
> for power users running NT, Linux, UNIX, etc.

I just got the 12GB'er and popped it in my Linux box.  The only problem
I'm having with it is that fdisk only let me make a 8GB partition.  I'm
not sure what the problem is.  The system BIOS is from 10/94 and it
allowed me to manually enter all the proper drive parameters.  When I
went in to fdisk it, it complained that there were 1027 cylinders:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1027.
This is larger than 1024, and may cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software form other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by
w(rite)
 
This gave me an 8GB partition:

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1027 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot   Begin    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1            1        1     1027  8249346   83  Linux native

Newsflash:  While writing this help request I figured it out.  The
secret is to go into fdisk "expert" mode and manually change the number
of cylinders and heads.  However its "missing" about 600MB.

# df
Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hdb1          11336759     13   10748051     0%    /d       

Fdisk now complains thus:

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 1027.
This is larger than 1024, and may cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software form other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): v
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63)
Total allocated sectors 23547826 greater than the maximum 16498755

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hdb: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 1027 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot   Begin    Start      End   Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hdb1            1        1     1466 11773912+  83  Linux native
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary:
     phys=(1023, 15, 63) should be (1023, 254, 63)
      
Oh well, atleast it kinda works.  Can anybody help me here?