I'm working for company that has Red Had 7.2 release w/ 2.4.9-13 kernel. I don't know much about system , except it has a 40Gb SCSI drive attached to an Adaptec 29160N controller. He's running VMWARE & says that's the only kernel that works with it.

Adaptec's web site has a patch for the 29160N under linux, but a warning that other things are changed by the patch. Furthermore the patch doesn't refer to that specific kernel number - more like 2.4.9 (what does the -10 come from?)

I'm a complete Linux newbie & don't understand how different parts of the system fit together. I''ve used SCSI since it was first available for PC's but only with DOS & Windows. Does Linux (Red Hat in particular) have drivers like DOS or Windows? or is everything incorporated into the kernel?

I ran fdisk (RedHat supplied) & it said there were X (some large number I forget) cylinders & all were used for one partition on the drive & that came out to 14Gb, How do I get it to recognize the whole drive? Does it have something to do with the 29160N? I believe the guy who set up the system, did not originally have the SCSI HD in it. It boots from an IDE drive. A Sony SCSI tape drive works fine.

My experience with an AHA2940UW on my home machine gave cylinder & head numbers that had no correspondence to the actual pyhsical geometry, (of a different HD) but it got the size right.

Any hints, answers, suggestions, most appreciated. you can reach me by email at linuxATstarpranDOTcom.

Try fdisk on the drive and with the 'p' option and see if there's any free space on the drive. Actually cfdisk is another partition utility from the command line that puts things in a little better perspective. If there is Free Space, partition that the way you like it, don't touch the existing partition, and see how that works... it might, and I mean might as in 1000 to 1 mess up the existing partition. The problem shouldn't be with the adaptec card's drivers... I think its disk limitation is something near 100... although I oddly enough have a ton of non-adaptec scsi cards around, weird eh?

Also, the -10 refers to RedHat's build number, specific to them, They ran with 10 builds of that kernel in development before settling on that one.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for the response. Guess I wasn't clear. When I ran fdisk it said there are 17547 cylinders on the drive and all were used for the partition. There is no free space.

I'm wondering if I can use the expert mode of fdisk & change the number of heads from the default 63 to 256 (the max) & likewise with sectors (32 to 64)??? or whatever makes it come to 40g. One site said there was a limit of 10, 8, 6 bits for cyl, hd, sect fields in some basic operations, but it was a few years old.

I came into this part way - I believe the drive was not originally detected. In fact the 29160N may have been added after installation. I see there's a module aic7xxx.o that is suppossed to be used for adaptec 160; but a) I don't know how this is used/incorporated into the system, b) does this change the kernel? I understand .o is for object module (or at least in my programming experience in some systems), I assume it gets linked to something - to what? how is that done? where does it have to go for whatever is linking to find it? do I need to modify some make script to tell it where it is, etc?? if so where's that? can that be done while the system is connected to LAN? or is there an easier way to do it?

Sorry for all the dumb questions - I've read a few Linux books & read a book on Minix when it came out, but still feel like a complete idiot -- and Linux for Idiots isn't going to help that.

At boot time, before you even get to the boot prompt, you have a chance to get into the Adaptec's setup utility (pressing ctrl-A or so). You can look at what the card itself thinks the disk is. That should give you some info.

While there are some patches for the aic7xxx driver, it's highly likely that they are kernel-specific. 2.4.9 is pretty old now (and it's NOT true that Vmware needs that kernel -- I run Vmware with 2.4.19). But you are basically right about the driver. It is a kernel module, and since you can see the disk in fdisk, this is most likely ok.

Forget about heads and cylinders in SCSI disks - it's all pretend-play so the kernel has a way to understand the disk, the SCSI interface shields all that info from the OS. That wouldn't help you but most likely corrupt the disk.

Bottom line, unless the Adaptec setup tells you something new, that is what you get. Did you say what disk that was? In any case, if you diddle with the setup utility, MAKE A BACKUP FIRST.

How exactly did you get the 14GB figure? "p" in fdisk gives for one of my disks

[QUOTE]Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda1: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 8923 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

so 8923 * 16065 * 512 / 1024 /1024/ 1024 = 68 (GB)

is that how you calculated the number?

Hope it helps,
mlp

I know about the ctl-A at boot. trying to resolve as much as possible without booting as the system is needed by the business. The SCSI disk is currently *unused* I can trash it to my hearts content as long as I don't damage the drive. Unfortunately, I don't know what the drive is. The president of the company & something of a computer whiz says it's a 40G. He's not great about keeping track of model numbers, product ID #'s, CD key's etc. One of the system utilities said it was 14Gb & it acts like it. I.e. it ran out of space trying to cp a large dir from another system.

I know that the SCSI controller uses LBA & ignores all the physical geometry that may be in the partition when going about it's normal business; however a site (can't find link now) said there's one function that still is used even w/ SCSI drives that uses C/H/S numbers if only for comming up with something for partition table. All I want to do is make the partition table look like it has 40G drive, or make the controller card realize that it has a 40G drive & tell fdisk that.
I'd gladly use cfdisk or even sfdisk, & scsiinfo, I just can't seem to find them. Or if I do find something it says it has XYZ dependencies & it sounds like I'll be trying to find & install stuff from several different distributions & they refer to file Y.so or SOMETHING.shar. What the @#$! how is one suppossed to know what this is all about? I've programmed for 40yrs on just about every machine most people have heard of & several few have, in assembly & various other languages and I can't seem to penetrate the obscurity that surrounds the Linux world. I'm all for the open source movement, dump M$ & their ilk (Symantec, Intuit, etc), but there's a LOT to be said for standardization - that's the only way the railroad system got off the ground.
Sorry for the rant. I'd like to get away from M$ completely, but the Linux world seems to be tossing one roadblock after another. I really don't think I'm dumb; possible, but I just don't think so.

When you get a chance to reboot, get into the Adaptec utility which will tell you about the exact name of the drive, model nr, and so on. Then you can look it up what the specs and sizes are.

Hope it helps,
mlp

Did that the other day & to confirm it the guy who ordered the drive & installed it, took a look at the drive. Sure enough Seagate web site said it's an 18.4Gb drive & it was only a W (wide) not ultra2 wide or 160. He swore he'd ordered a 40g.
I've learned something in this process.