[lug] big disk limitations

[John Karns]

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Calvin Dodge said:

> I've put 40 gig drives on a couple of computers - a P-133 system with
> a 430TX chipset, and a Celeron 366 system (Micronics C-300 - 440LX
> chipset).
>
> The P-133 saw just the first 8 gigs.  No problem - I just make sure
> the boot partition fit within that part of the drive, and the kernel
> saw the whole thing.

> Meanwhile - no matter what I told the BIOS about the drive's size -
> the C-300 would simply hang at the disk recognition stage of the
> second BIOS boot screen.  The only way I could get it to work was to
> tell the BIOS that NO drives were attached, and to start the system
> from a boot floppy.
>
> I saw the same behavior with a Tyan S1592 (Via MP3, IIRC) motherboard.

This describes the situation I am experiencing with a 40GB IDE on an ASUS
P5A (K6-II / 500 Mhz) mobo.  Many times it hangs during disk recognition,
ocassionally times out and continues the boot process.  But although I
could partition the whole drive as a single 40 GB partition, it wouldn't
format unless the partition size was < 32 GB; that was with a 2.2.19
kernel.

Someone here suggested that formatting under a 2.4.x kernel
should allow formatting the 40GB partition, the 2.4 kernels I've compiled
on that machine won't boot!  It starts to uncompress the kernel image,
then reboots.  Ditto with a Compaq laptop with a K6-II / 380 Mhz CPU.
The strange thing is that I updated the distro on the 500 Mhz machine,
which installed a 2.4.4 kernel, and it boots fine.  Must be something in
my kernel cfg that is incompatible with K6-II's.

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net