big disks and old BIOS

From: Andries Brouwer (aeb@veritas.com)
Date: Fri Jun 16 2000 - 18:54:43 EST


A larger than 33.8 GB disks may cause an old BIOS to hang at
boot time. One can place a jumper to make the disk appear 33.8 GB,
and then booting is succesful, but access to sector 66055248 and above
yields I/O errors.
Installing MaxBlast / EZ-Drive solves this, but is an ugly solution.
Thanks to the report by Shane Wegner we now have confirmation
that in such a case a small Linux utility that executes the
READ NATIVE MAX ADDRESS and SET MAX ADDRESS commands suffices
to get full capacity back. See also
        http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-11.html#ss11.3

So, no need anymore to upgrade the BIOS or install MaxBlast.
An all-Linux solution suffices.

Andries

(I will make the utility available some other day - no time right now.)

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