Partition sizes limited to 2GB

treecat · 12-25-2005, 09:02 AM

I've run into this with several older systems. In no case would modification of boot parameters or BIOS settings allow the kernel to see the full disk size. In these situations I found that an add-in ATA card (Promise, Maxtor, etc.) solved the problem. Every distribution I've tried contains drivers for these cards and provides full access to the drive. One note: some distributions (SuSE comes to mind) treat the drive attached to the card as the first hard disk device (/dev/hda) and name the physical drive 0 as /dev/hde.

kitaru2004 · 12-25-2005, 01:34 PM

I tried the drive in another machine running WinME. It was detected correctly and I was able to make a full-sized partition (Well, sort of. Due to limitations in FAT32 it was 32GB, but that isn't the problem right now.) but in Linux I didn't have such luck. I tried using LBA and manual input of the correct numbers for drive geometry, but I still am limited to 2GB in Linux. I'll be sure to post any other developments here as time goes on. Thank you for your continued support.