Maxtor SATA Drives

From: Justin Spies (jspies_at_pantek.com)
Date: 02/28/04 

Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 01:13:12 GMT

Hello Everyone,
I needed to enlist some assistance from the Linux community. I've
recently purchased pieces parts for a system and I've run into a small
problem.

I purchased an Intel motherboard (D865PERLL), P4 2.8Ghz CPU, memory and
drives. Unfortunately I made a bit of a snap decision and found out
after the fact that the SATA drives I've purchased are not always so
pleasant to setup.

The problem is that I intended to use software RAID which unfortunately
won't work. The drives in question are both Maxtor 120GB SATA drives of
the same make and model (they even have the same date of mfg from Asia).
  The problem is that, despite the similarities, they are quite different.

When I boot the system, the kernel (as I understand the situation) is
assigning different geometry specs to the drives. Here is the output:

[root@mail old]# hdparm /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
  readonly = 0 (off)
  geometry = 14946/255/63, sectors = 240121728, start = 0
[root@mail old]# hdparm /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
  readonly = 0 (off)
  geometry = 14946/255/63, sectors = 240121728, start = 0

While hdparm looks ok (the are sdx because I am running 2.6.3 and the
drives are automatically setup as libata / ide_scsi), the fact is that
fdisk is seeing completely different values:

[root@mail old]# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 238216 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

    Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 249 125464+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 250 2188 977256 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 2189 6064 1953504 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 6065 238216 117004608 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 6065 234341 115051576+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sda6 234342 238216 1952968+ 83 Linux
[root@mail old]# fdisk -l /dev/sdb

Disk /dev/sdb: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

    Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 16 128488+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb2 17 141 1004062+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb3 142 385 1959930 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb4 386 14946 116961232+ 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 386 14946 116961201 fd Linux raid autodetect
[root@mail old]#

So when I try to setup the partitions, they don't align and software
RAID isn't to happy.

Here is what I've tried:
   1. Setup both drives (in the BIOS) with LBA disabled.
   2. Setup the system with one drive as LBA set to AUTO and the other
set to disabled.
   3. Swapping cables.
   4. Using the following startup config (in GRUB):
          root=(hd0,0) (the boot partition)
          kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.3SMP-xfs ro root=/dev/sda2 sda=14946,255,63
          initrd /initrd-2.6.3SMP-xfs.img

   5. Using the following startup config (in GRUB):
          root=(hd0,0) (the boot partition)
          kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.3SMP-xfs ro root=/dev/sda2 \
                                                sdb=238216,16,63
          initrd /initrd-2.6.3SMP-xfs.img

         (for the above kernel line, there was no \ and line break.)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Justin Spies

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