Large disks (4G and more)

Kai Henningsen (kai@khms.westfalen.de)
24 Jun 1995 14:09:00 +0200


Sorry if you see this twice, but I think the first one got lost somehow
...

Well, until recently I didn't expect to come anywhere near, so I ignored
anything that might have been said about it. As usually, you only realize
it when it's somewhat late ...

... and now I have a 4.1 GB disk and want to use it with Linux.

After some staring at the screen, it dawned to me that there was a problem
with things like lseek on a /dev/sda of this size, which explains why
Linux fdisk doesn't work.

Before trying to address this, I thought I'd find out what other parts of
the picture are missing, especially in the fs and device area.

What can go wrong when a disk has slightly more than 2^32 bytes apacity?
And what will most certainly go wrong?

Hopefully some of you can give me some ideas where to look at.

MfG Kai