Hard Drives and Kernal Source

[Krikket]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003, Tom Mitchell wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Dec 2003, Krikket wrote:
> > On Sat, 27 Dec 2003, Christopher K. Johnson wrote:
> > > Krikket wrote:
> > >
> > > >Has anyone else had problems getting Fedora to recognize their hard drives
> > > >at full capacity?  I have a 20 gig drive that the BIOS recognises as ..
>
> > > How are you checking the disk size under Linux?
> > > If as root you enter this command what do you get?
> > >
> > > dmesg|grep sectors
> >
> > Odd.  That *did* show the full drive.  I got the errant value during the
> > install.
>
> Depending on the BIOS and the BIOS settings this initial BIOS
> related disk size issue is common.  As long as your bootstrap
> partition is located in the beginning of the disk (for you,
> inside the first 2GB) you will be OK and no change is needed.
> i.e. don't fix it -- when it ain't broken.
<Snip for space>
> >From a western digital support page.
>    BIOS Dates	May not support
>    prior to	drives larger than
>    Jun 1999 	32GB
>
> Question:
>
> One thing I do not know is what happens when a file system much
> bigger than the BIOS limit is the location of bootstrap code. At
> first the initial location on the disk is going to be within the
> reach of the BIOS but a later updates on a full disk might place
> blocks of data for the new kernel beyond the reach of the BIOS.
> I believe the defaults in the auto partition RH code makes this a
> non question but still I am curious.
>
> A rescue Floppy or FC1-Disc1 would boot, but how to recover is
> unclear.
>
> BTW: What are your partitions?
> 	#  cat /proc/partitions

I ran across the problem when I was using a harddrive that has Suse
installed, so ir was probably 512/swap, X/boot 19G/root.

Fedora didn't want to recognize those partitions though.  I later
discovered that it showed *no* partitions on the drive.  As there wasn't
anything that needed to be saved, I went ahead and repartitioned (and
reformatted) the drive.

Then, when I next attempted the install, Fedora saw all 20 gig, not just
the 2 gig.

I have no clue *why* it worked like that, but it did...  (I mean, I was
repartitioning the harddrive during the install process anyway!)

Krikket