I have a 160G hard disk. I had installed it in a mobile rack, and used it on a vary old machine that couldn't talk to hard disks of more than 131GB (I think that's a power of two). I partitioned all it could see of the disk (only 131GB, of course) as a single partition and used it without trouble as a backup drive for years.
Being in a mobile rack, I also used it on a machine that does recognise larger drives. Now one of my machines (called lovesong) currently boots from ab 80GB hard disk that is slowly failing. Yesterday came the time to reorganise my deployment of hard disks. I plan to replace the 80GB failing drive with the 160GB drive mentioned above. The first step would seem to be to copy my existing sarge to it after appropriate partitioning: This new machine with the failing drive has no problem reading and writing the existing 131Gb partition. fdisk recognises it as being a 16oGB drive. fdisk happily created two new partitions at the end of the drive. They passed a bad-block check and an ext3 file system. I copied my existing / partition from the old, failing drive using rsync, adjusted lilo.conf to be able to boot the new sarge as well as the old, and adjusted the new drive's /etc/fstab to recognise itself as containing the / partition. When I rebooted, I was astonished how *slowly* it booted. During a lilo boot, it writes a series of dots on the screen. I'm used to them appearing and flashing off the screen faster than I can quite see them. But when booting from the new drive at /dev/hdc4, they appeared at about one per second -- about the same speed I'd expect from a *very* slow floppy drive. And after the dots finished appearing, it did nothing at all. Presumably it had not succeeded in loading a working kernel. Now I remember seeing one message that I ignored some time through the process -- a warning that the kernel's drive geometry differed from the BIOS's. I'm not sure what system component produced this message, nor its exact text. But I'm so accustomed to the artificiality of drive geometries that I ignored it. fdisk says: lovesong:/farhome/hendrik# fdisk /dev/hdc The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 310101. 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 (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/hdc: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 310101 cylinders Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdc1 1 266305 134217688+ 83 Linux /dev/hdc3 266306 288203 11036592 83 Linux /dev/hdc4 288204 310101 11036592 83 Linux Command (m for help): Could its use as a small drive have poisoned it for use as a large one? I've never noticed any lack of speed in the past, certianly not a factor of a hundred or so slowdown over normal disk behaviour. Is the sarge lilo so old that it cannot handle drives with more than 131GB or boot partitions after the first 1024 cymlinders? -- hendrik -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
