New development: (in some quarters, called Progress)
I chatted on the phone today with WD. Apparently the ~120GB limitation
is a consequence of my using native Windows drivers which do not have
48-bit addressing capability and thus cannot address beyond the 120GB
limit (I trust you guys on the arithmetic)
Apparently when I installed drive 1 (/hde) using the WD utility
provided, that installed the 48-bit addressing driver and associated
/hde with it. Since I partitioned /hdf entirely with the native Windows
partition software, that drive did not have 48 bit addressing support
So, from Windows XP, I upgraded the driver, and lo and behold I was now
able to see the full 160GB in /hdf, and formatted a third partition
under fat32
Now when I look at both drives from linux using cfdisk, I CAN'T SEE
EITHER DRIVE!!!
Conclusion: cfdisk (and I presume debian in general) does not provide 48
bit support and reaches erroneous conclusions ("Bad primary partition x:
Partition begins after end-of-disk", where x=1 for /hde and x=2 for
/hdf)
I have cfdisk version 2.11n installed. The package version available at
the debian site is 2.11n-5+1. I'm not familiar with which drivers
provide disk I/O
--
David
-----Original Message-----
From: Pigeon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 4:48 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: fstab/mount filesystem nomenclature
On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 02:54:47AM -0500, David Turetsky wrote:
> Pigeon, a postscript. WD has their own BIOS on the Promise controller.
> It gets hooked in by the system BIOS and then does it's own thing
> without leaving any fingerprints elsewhere
>
> I will email Western Digital and see if I can get some insight into
what
> they are doing
I had a VERY QUICK look on Google and WD's website, and it seems that:
- Linux can get round the 137Gb limit already
- WD's solution for Windoze seems to consist of a change to the BIOS
on the Promise card and a driver for Windoze.
This leads to two possible ideas:
- Reinstall the original BIOS on the Promise card, accept the Windoze
limitation
- Patch the Linux kernel driver module for the Promise card to agree
with WD's modified BIOS.
I don't know if such a patch exists, but if not it probably will
before long.
Shame that Linux is being held up by Windoze's failings!
Pigeon
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