how to troubleshoot disk size limit?

lxa2xjj · 08-07-2008, 12:42 PM

hello gang,

I'm new to linux and this forum, and love command line systems.

I've inherited a linux server which I must keep running for a business.

I just electrically installed a 500gb IDE drive as the secondary master, no slave.

fdisk seems to report the drive as 130 gig. How do I figure what is limiting me, the motherboard, the bios, the kernel, or fdisk or something with the distrib.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

thanks in advance!

John

Debian linux 3.1 sarge
Kernel ver 2.4
ASUS motherboard (approx 5 years old)

fdisk reports:

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:~#
willow:~#

jailbait · 08-07-2008, 01:00 PM

This web page says that fdisk gets the drive geometry from the kernel. The kernel gets it from one of several unreliable sources. If you know the correct geometry you can use the /proc filesystem to supply the correct geometry:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-9.html

----------------------
Steve Stites

Sjonnie48 · 08-07-2008, 01:34 PM

Could you give me some details:

1 - what is the capacity of the harddisks on the primary controller;
2 - have you checked the bios setup regarding the new harddisk.

I ask this because the age of the motherboard reminds me of something that happened to me once. In the past I installed a new 80GB hd on an Asus P2BF motherboard.
Then the bios had to be updated to enable a larger than 20GB disk capacity.
Although it seems unlikely to me hat this is the matter with your motherboard, it is always useful to eliminate that possibility.

Good luck.