Re: Big-disk woes
From: Mark South (marksouth_at_null.invalid)
Date: 01/28/05
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Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 11:58:44 +0100
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 17:41:03 +0000, Jules wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:57:08 +0100, Mark South wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:09:40 +0100, Frederic LIRZIN wrote:
>>
>>> there is a limit at 137 Gb ( so at 128 GB) with old bios systems.
>>> if it use a 28 bit LBA mode your system is only able to see 137 Gb of
>>> your disk 2^28 * 512 = 137438953472 b or 137 Gb or 128 GB.
>>> to see the entire disk it must use 48 bit LBA mode which allow your
>>> system to adress 2^48 * 512 = 1.44115e+17 b or 1.44115e+8 Gb or
>>> 134217728 GB.
>>
>> All true, as it applies to the BIOS.
>>
>>> so you must use the newiest bios with 48 LBA support for your
>>> motherboard or see about your IDE motherbooard drivers.
>>
>> Not necessarily true: I am running Mandrake 10.1 on an Intel mobo with a
>> BIOS that sees my 160Gb Maxtor as 137Gb. It still boots fine, and Linux
>> can see and use the entire disk.
>
> In the olden days the system still needed the bios to load any boot loader
> and necessary files from /boot in order to bootstrap the kernel though;
Well, the BIOS still has to initiate the bootloader.
> it was only when the kernel was loaded the control could be passed over
> to Linux (which would talk to the hardware directly and not need the BIOS
> interface to the hard disk)
Things like GRUB begin taking over once they are initiated.
> Afraid I've been using SCSI disks for the last *mumble* years though, so
> I'm not up to speed with what's happening in the IDE world these days.
Drives get bigger, a little faster, and have more onboard cache. And
they're cheaper. So no change.
> Maybe it's possible that you're lucky in that all of your boot files
> etc. are 'within reach' of the BIOS, and of course once the Linux kernel
> has booted it likely doesn't care what the BIOS' idea of disk geometry
> or addressing it. (I think that's sound in theory, someone else will
> confirm or deny I'm sure)
Well, it's not dumb luck, but it's not hard to make sure that / and its
immediate contents are on low-numbered partitions.
>> Also, there is no problem with having a Gb each for / and /boot and
>> swap, it's the simplest thing to do when you are swimming in Gbs.
>
> Easy to say that when you've got an empty drive and clean install
> though, but it's annoying when you ultimately run out of space if you've
> got spare capacity laying around on an under-utilised partition...
That depends on your perspective on space. If you go ripping a lot of
music to FLAC format, an extra Gb here or there means nothing :-)
-- Mark South: World Citizen, Net Denizen
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