Hello All,

I've got an older file server that's running RedHat 6.2, and its hot-spare backup mate, running RedHat 7.2. I tried to put a large disk on it, but found it would only look at the first 120 GB, even though the drive was 160GB or so. This was a little over a year ago and at the time I found that there was some issue with the new drive standards - was it UDMA66? - unfortunately I don't recall exactly. But I do recall that the concensus at the time was that a new driver was necessary, but nobody had one written yet.

It had never occurred to me that there might be a CPU problem as was suggested by someone else today who reported only 8GB being seen by his box. -shrug-

...I would love to be able to use the new larger drives. It would be great if someone can comment on the following:

* Is there a hardware problem with doing this? (I suspect not.)

* Is there a driver I can get to support the newer drives on that older box?

* If RH6.2 can't be convinced - short of building a driver from sources or something like that (which I can't do for various reasons) - what older releases of RedHat have the support I'm looking for?

Thanks bunches,

Richard

Does the BIOS see it as 160? What kernel are you using? And can you post the output of dmesg?

Thank You
-Joey

get a pci controller card

In many systems the kernel bypasses the BIOS and finds out the capacity of the hard drive. In others the BIOS can not be bypass. Buying a new controller will not work even it has 48-bit LBA. You need to patch your kernel for 48-bit LBA or download kernel version 2.6.x to be able to use 160 GB or bigger hard drives.

You can try specify the cylinders, heads, and sectors of the hard drive to the boot loader.