Problem with partitioning 180Gb harddisk

M. van Katwijk · 07-21-2003, 05:39 AM

I have a question about a Hitachi 180Gb drive.

I use a debian woody 2.4.18 kernel and tried to make a clean install on this brand new harddrive. When I tried to partition this harddrive, only 137Gb was available.

My question is, how can i get the remaining 43Gb visible and partition it.

I am trying to get 2 of this drives working as a mirror with a Promise TX2 FastTrak card.

Thx

geoff_f · 07-21-2003, 06:25 AM

This is most likely due to a limitation of the ATA interface you're using, which uses only 28 bits for addressing. That is, it is not the OS or the Hitachi drive at fault, rather the ATA controller. More info here:

http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/p...371905,00.html

I've seen advertisements for ATA interface cards that get past this 137GB barrier; an example here:

http://www.transintl.com/store/categ...m?Category=953

It looks like you might need to buy a new ATA controller card.

geoff_f · 07-21-2003, 06:32 AM

...Or buy a motherboard with a VIA VT8233A Southbridge (uses 48-bit addressing). More info here:

http://www.via.com.tw/en/Digital%20Library/maxtor.jsp

I think 144 PetaBytes should be enough...

M. van Katwijk · 07-21-2003, 07:43 AM

Thx Geoff_f for your reply, i know that the promise card i have uses 48-bit addressing. That's why i bought it.

If i partition this card from dos, with partition magic. I can get all the 180Gb and use it. But i don't want to install Windoze on it.
It is just a PII 400 MHz with 256Mb of memory.

But could it be a problem that i can't disable my onboard IDE controller? I compiled a new kernel with the promise drivers build in.

geoff_f · 07-21-2003, 03:36 PM

A couple of things to try:

1. Kernel upgrade. Does 2.4.18 kernel support LBA48? When googling, I saw reference to 2.4.19 doing that.

2. Promise card BIOS update. Has Promise got a BIOS update on their website? Perhaps they have fixed an early bug.

3. Is your drive using Ultra DMA? I saw reference to the Linux kernel not supporting LBA48 unless the drive was actually using DMA. See here:

http://lists.insecure.org/lists/linu.../Apr/4932.html

Search these forums, or 'man hdparm' to see how to make sure Ultra DMA is set.

RottenMutt · 07-21-2003, 10:01 PM

uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.4.20-18.9smp #1 SMP Thu May 29 06:55:05 EDT 2003 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

dmesg
....
hda: WDC WD2000JB-00DUA3, ATA DISK drive
blk: queue c0457500, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff)
hdc: SAMSUNG CDRW/DVD SM-352B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: attached ide-disk driver.
hda: host protected area => 1
hda: 390721968 sectors (200050 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=24321/255/63, UDMA(66)

hda is a 200GB Western digital and the full disk shows up

M. van Katwijk · 07-22-2003, 03:55 PM

Thx again geof_f and also RottenMutt,

I finaly get my total amount of HD space available.

The kernel upgrade to 2.4.20 did solve the problem. Now I can try to get my raid 1 available, and boot from it. That's another problem.

stevenhasty · 07-22-2003, 05:58 PM

if you have partition magic, can you not create an ext2/3 filesystem with it?