[lug] Large capacity hdd's

[John Karns]

A week ago I purchased a 40GB ATA/100 drive - it's amazing how cheap hdd's
have become...  After connecting it to my aging mobo (Asus P5A w/ IDE
UDMA/33), the system would hang during POST.  I disabled the BIOS probe on
the appropriate IDE channel to get around that problem.

Then Linux could indeed see the entire 40GB ("fdisk -l") and I was able to
format it as a reiserfs partition.  Incidently, on that machine I'm
running a reiser-patched 2.2.19 kernel.  However, I was unable to mount
it, so I re-partitioned as 32GB and formatted, and I'm now able to mount
it.  It seemed a little strange that it would format but not mount.
Perhaps there is some 32GB kernel limit external to the reiserfs kernel
code (?), I don't know.  It would be interesting to try the same thing
with a SCSI hdd of equal or greater capacity to see if one would encounter
the same issues.

I'll probably end up upgrading the mobo before too long, or I'll look
around for an ATA/100 controller, but I'm wondering if I can expect to
encounter the 32GB limit again barring any future kernel changes in this
regard.

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John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net