Someone gave me one of their old drives, a Maxtor 80GB drive. When I try to see the capacity of the disk, it is only showing 33GB. On the web, I found the "Large Capacity HOWTO" and tried the "setmax" command that they tell you to use. This error came up "setmax -d 0":

HDIO_DRIVE_CMD_AED failed.

The capacity of the drive is still limited to 33GB. I also tried the "setmax -m 66055248" and then rebooted and again "setmax -d 0". Both commands gave a HDIO error.

I searched LQ for an answer, and looked up the error on Google, but did not find a solution.

What version of Linux kernel you are using? How do you measure the capacity, with fdisk?

Linux kernel 2.6.22
(parted) p
Model: Maxtor 6 Y080P0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 33.8GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

I could not find out what the errors mean. A Google search for the HDIO_DRIVE_CMD_AED turned up nothing.

Seems like a BIOS limitation, how old is this motherboard?
That's weird, Linux shouldn't care about BIOS limits, maybe parted is using BIOS ... what does fdisk say?

fdisk v2.13
fdisk also gave a warning,
"The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 4111.
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"

I also have a post asking about hdparm errors from this Maxtor drive:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ata133-643112/

edit: I also tried to put the jumper on the "Limit Capacity" setting and retried the "setmax -m" and setmax -d" commands, and there was no change. It still shows up as 33GB.