20G hard drive only showing up as 4G...
 

Redhat 8.0...

# hdparm -i /dev/hdc

/dev/hdc:

Model=Maxtor 2B020H1, FwRev=WAK21R90, SerialNo=B1KDYYLE
Config={ Fixed }
RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=57
BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16
CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=40020624
IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2
UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5
AdvancedPM=yes: disabled (255) WriteCache=enabled
Drive conforms to: (null): 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

# df -kh
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 18G 17G 0 100% /
none 219M 0 219M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hdc1 4.0G 0 3.9G 0% /var/www/html


any ideas? Unfortunately, I can't sit at the computer, so I can't check the bios - anything else I might look at (assuming the bios is set correctly)?

thanks

Okay, the BIOS can see big because /dev/hda is a 20 also and it sees the whole thing:

Check with cfdisk to see if you partitioned it correctly, if there's 15Gb of unused space that'll be the culprit, if so you can partition out that unused space and 99 out of a 100 nothing bad will happen to /dev/hdc1.

The best way to see if the kernel saw the whole drive is to check dmesg for something like:

hda: 6306048 sectors (3229 MB) w/418KiB Cache, CHS=782/128/63, UDMA(33)

The size reported is what it gets from BIOS, and I once miss jumpered an 80Gig into a 32 Gig...

Cheers,

Finegan

cfdisk on hdc says:so it appears to see the whole thing..
here's what I get:
..again, appears to be all there. ?

any more ideas? Am I reading something wrong?

thanks a ton for the tips, I didn't know about cfdisk (which I had to install) or dmesg. ;)
-brian

This one's a stumper, I'm bugging some of the other mods about it right now, but you've never happened to use any of those nasty Maxtor "factory" utilities or any of that goop one it? It's a first guess, but we figured it would probably blag fdisk rather hard...

Cheers,

Finegan

Backup first. My guess is that you may have some MAXBLAST goo in there (HDD BIOS) which provides (among other things) a workaround for buggy mobo bios-es.

This will reformat your hard drive. It's not a low-level format but the next lowest step is to just buy a new drive.

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

That's my guess and I'm sticking with it.

Edit: I could be wrong about the problem/solution, but this approach (the shotgun type) will at least do a media verification on the whole platter. You can use it to rid the drive of frikkin viruses.

I'm no expert in LINUX. Try posting your fcstab file. It could also be the bootloader (LILO, GRUB, etc).

Like other people said. Buy another hard drive. Try buying a different brand like Western Digital, IBM, Seagate. Western Digital and IBM has the lowest CPU utilizing percentage.

Okay, BrianK, go to the console as root and type bash#fdisk /dev/hdc. Now it's time to go slowly and read the screens. You can type m for the menu or help screen. We want to type p. This will show you all partitions on that hard drive, specifically hdc1 @ 5gb.

If there are other partitions, make sure you are mounting them correctly in fstab. If you don't understand that part, post the screen in text here and we'll try to help.

Provided that the only partion listed is hdc1, type n for new partition. Select [p] primary and 2 for second partion. (Now, I have no free space so I'm doing the rest of this by memory.)

It's going to ask you for a starting block. Hit enter and it'll choose the next free block. Then, it'll ask you for an ending block. It should default to the last block on the drive. If you hit enter, you will have ~15gb partition called hdc2.

If you've followed those directions and they work so far, type w to write the partition table. (If you mess up before this point, type q to quit without saving.) Either way you'll be back to a command prompt. If you wrote the partition table and you have a hdc2, type bash#mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc2 to format the partition as ext3. Mount and enjoy.

Being insulting never helps much, especially if you don't read every post in a thread carefully:

Code:

---

ode:    Name        Flags        Part Type      FS Type                  Size (MB)
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    /dev/hdc1                Primary        Linux                    19540.00

---

cfdisk, fdisk, it doesn't matter, this is something much stranger than un-appropriated space.

Cheers,

Finegan

What filesystem type are you using for the /dev/hdc1 partition?

the hdc1 partition is Linux.

I re-did the partition using cfdisk (deleted, then re-created). When I tried to write the partition table, I got "Wrote partition table, but re-read table failed. Reboot to update table."

so I rebooted, and now it doesn't show up at all when I do a df, but it does show up if I do a cfdisk /dev/hdc. interesting.

Well, the box is 12 hours from where I live - The owner suspects there's something wrong with the drive, so he's slapping a new one in there later this week.

Thanks for the help.

Yeah, but which linux filesystem?

:)

df will only show up if the drive is mounted. cfdisk or fdisk -l will show all partitions on the drive, then you can mount them, and df them.

*Just to clarify*

Cool