Re: Big-disk woes

From: Tom F. (furtom2001_at_india.com)
Date: 01/28/05 

Date: 28 Jan 2005 02:49:22 -0800

prg wrote:

Thank you very much for your informative and helpful post.

>And shrink that / partition as well -- it should be as small as
>possible. Use more patition(s) for /temp /usr /var and /opt. Extra
>space with a scratch partition and/or just leave some of the disk
>unpartitioned for future use. Or read up on LVM.
Seems like good advice. temp? I wouldn't think temp needed it's own
partition. what about etc?

>"my motherboard is bit LBA" -- hmmm .....
Ha, ha. Sorry. I left out the 28. I found the original specs.

>AA261011.ZIP
>Support AMD XP2100+ CPU.
>Add LBA 48-bit addressing
>mode support. << need this?
This puzzles me. If you notice on that site, this isn't the latest
bios. It's 1011. The first thing I tried was flashing the bios to the
latest available, 1013. So I guess I do have 48 bit support. I'm
completely confused as to the problem now. Maybe it's in the bios
setup.

I found this info here on the western digital drive:
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=932&p_created=1049408910&p_sid=7PkbmFwh&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MiZwX3NlYXJjaF90eXBlPXNlYXJjaF9mbmwmcF9wYWdlPTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1XRDI1MDBCQg**&p_li=
Part of the problem is the manufacturer offers very little in the way
of documentation with the product. It's plenty enough if you are using
windows, but they mention nothing about bios. They include propriety
software to install the drive in windows.

>Don't worry about _any_ complaints about partitions not ending on
>cylinder boundaries. CHS has been outdated/useless for 15 years --
Yeah, that's just what I'm seeing.

>Besides the BIOS you need to be sure to use an 80 line IDE cable --
not
>an old 40 line cable.
I think I'm OK with this, I'm using the new cable that came with the
drive.

>Make sure the jumpers on disk and BIOS are properly set. Some disks
>have a jumper that makes them "friendlier" to use with older BIOSes.
>Some BIOS/disk combos don't work well with CS (cable select),
>especially with a 40 line cable.
I'm beginning to suspect this as a possibility. I think I'll try
setting it as master rather than CS.

>Even with a new disk, I always run badblocks
>when doing a fresh install.
How to do this? Sorry, I have no idea.

>I notice that this is hdc -- are you sure you have a
>clean/sufficient power supply? Switch disk power plugs?
Should be no problems there.

>All that comes to mind "off" the top of my head (except hair 0:(
Thanks you've been a big help. I'll try all these things and let you
know how it went.

Tom F.

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