[lug] Large capacity hdd's

[Ian S. Nelson]

This was a kernel problem that was fixed around 2.3.48 or so.. If you put a
2.4 kernel on that machine it will see all of the drive.  Taskfile support is
coming in 2.5 to get over the 132GB limit as well.


John Karns wrote:

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