Accidentally responded to Liam instead of the whole list, resending.
On 3/9/21 3:40 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 22:28, Jon Brase <jon.br...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 3/3/21 7:30 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
Yes. Use a disk manager. It will install a tiny overlay before the OS
boots and that will allow you to use arbitrarily-large disks without
problems. (Probably not with Linux, but with DOS, Win9x, OS/2 and
maybe even NT).
Actually, it looks like, through kernel 2.5.<mumble>, Linux explicitly
detected and worked with both OnTrack and EasyDrive. Since that version,
it has a tunable offset parameter that can be set appropriately for
either one by the user (63 sectors for OnTrack, 1 for EasyDrive). All
other avenues seem to have failed, so I may well be going that route
next.
That is actually quite impressive! I did not know that. Thanks for the
info.
Once installed, it's a good, simple, easy solution. I used to use them
a lot back in the day (late 1990s, roughly.)
Unfortunately, it's not working. OnTrack sees the same ultra-small
capacity for the drive as the BIOS and Linux see on that machine. It
picks up the other 40 GB 2.5" PATA drive, but the SSD + Adapter can't be
extended from what the BIOS sees to the actual size of the drive. I even
tried a different SSD on the adapter, and got almost the exact same
crippled size (130 MB), so I don't even get to test if Linux's offset
parameter works, even OnTrack isn't seeing the full drive size.
My working theory at this point is that the adapter is detecting that
it's working wtih an old BIOS and "helpfully" setting up a temporary
Host Protected Area on the drive, after which it refuses to acknowledge
that any area after the 130 MB mark even exists until poweroff. I
haven't been able to boot an environment that has hdparm(8) available,
so I haven't been able to test this.
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