160GB drive on kernel 2.6.3

From: Mark Atherton (htlshoqz_at_yahoo.co.uk)
Date: 09/23/04 

Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 21:26:59 +0100

I am puzzled! I have installed a 160GB parallel ATA hard disk on an
AOpen AK77-8X Max motherboard, which fdisk and cfdisk recognise as
"only" 33.8GB. This limit is, I understand, usually due to the BIOS and
so Linux should use the whole disk. This appears in /var/log/dmesg:

hdb: SAMSUNG SP1614N, ATA DISK drive
<snip>
hdb: max request size: 1024KiB
hdb: Host Protected Area detected.
         current capacity is 66055248 sectors (33820 MB)
         native capacity is 312581808 sectors (160041 MB)
hdb: 66055248 sectors (33820 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=16383/255/63,
UDMA(100)

So, the kernel is recognising that the disk is 160GB. What puzzles me is
that, despite this, I can only access 33.8GB. What puzzles me even more
  is that I also have an 80GB Maxtor drive in the PC and that is fine!

The disk label says that the geometry is 312,581,808 so I have tried
booting with the option "hdb=312,581,808" and also

# cfdisk -c 312 -h 581 -s 808 /dev/hdb

Neither makes any difference. In fact cfdisk complains that the heads
value is illegal. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Mark Atherton