Re: [aclug-L] 5.7 meg /dev/hdd

[Bob Deep <bobd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Phrostie wrote:
> 
> my wife just added a new harddrive to her computer.  it's a 5.7 gb
> maxtor diamondmax
> cfdisk tells me that it is readonly.
> fdisk will run but says
>     " you will not be able to write to the partition table.
>         you must set heads sectors and cylinders.
>         you can do this from the extra functions menu."
> 
> if i go into extra and cylinders i get "number of sylinders
> (1-[0]-65535)"
> 
> if i go into extra and sectors i get    "number of sectors (1-[0]-63)"
> 
> if i go into extra and heads i get       "number of heads (1-[0]-256)"
> 
> are these values total for the drive or are they the ranges for the
> partitions?

Not that I'm sure I know what's going on... But two things come to
mind...
1.  Did who ever put the hard drive in the box get the Bios setup with
the proper drive geomotery?  Fdisk does not seem to have the drive
geometry (thinks it is 0,0, 0) and usually the kernel gets this from the
bios (or the command line, or its own calculations ...) and fdisk asks
the kernel, so somewhere the information is not right (or over-written)
for you to get 0,0,0.

2.  Does your bios support large drives?  My old 486 doesn't, which is
only an issue for lilo and dos (as they use the bios to access your
disks).  Once booted though the kernel does its own thing and you are
not dependant upon the bios..  This means I have to run a Bios extender
(ez-drive) to get the dreaded MS-stuff to work... 

My guess is that the drive is not set up in the bios correctly...  You
will need to set the bios to the gemotery sudjested by the manufacture
(They generally print it on the drive these days).  

If the bios seems right, then we will need to know how you are booting
linux (a cut and paste of the console messages that fly by..).  That
will tell us what linux is being told about the drive by whom... 
Because if the bios is right, then somebody is over-riding this
information for the kernel...  So we will need the log of the boot
process, and a copy of the lilo.conf (to be sure the command line does
not have something that changes things).

-= Bob =-
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