On Thu, Jun 22, 2000 at 05:59:35PM +0100, Mike Davis wrote:
[Yecch, what a subject line]
> I bought myself a 40Gb drive 3 weeks ago and couldn't get access
> to the full drive using v2.2.11, only the first 30Gb (65535 of 79144cyls).
Indeed. Quoting from the HOWTO
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/Large-Disk-12.html
"Drives larger than 33.8 GB will not work with kernels older than 2.2.14 / 2.3.21."
> This didn't bother me until I got bored one day and thought, maybe
> it's a kernel limit, so I got 2.4_test1 and then (with a new cfdisk as well),
> no probs, I added a new partition for the remaining space, mounted it
> and copied some files in no problem.
>
> The problem arrived when I rebooted into my default kernel (2.2.11)
> without thinking about it and then started copying data into the new
> partition - the session hung and various disk errors spewed onto the
> screen... when I ran fsck, there were so many errors I gave up and
> just mkfs'd it... then I thought, maybe the disk was faulty,
> so I did an fsck of the first 30Gb and the same problem... so I landed up
> mkfs'ing that too. :((
>
> I ran a fsck -c on the whole disk and no problems under 2.4.
>
> Anyway, my question is, is it possible that the 2.2 kernel wrapped
> the cyl number around to (65535-79144) in the classic way when I tried
> to copy data onto the second partition? If so, wouldn't it
> be better to check for this (a negative number) and can the call
> instead of merrily over-writing the wrong bit of disk?
Unfortunately we cannot retroactively change 2.2.11.
Whatever bugs it contains, it contains.
What precisely happened with your 2.2.11 kernel depends on several things.
The kernel boot messages would make things clear, I suppose.
Repeating the HOWTO once more:
You need at least 2.2.14 or 2.3.21 to work with a larger than 33.8 GB disk.
Andries
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