On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 12:53:28PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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 TYPO: an > 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 TYPO: the drive. They passed a bad-block check while creating 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] >
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