I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong but was there ever such
a limit for IDE drives.
The limits are 528Mb for non-translating BIOSes, 8GB for translating
BIOSes and 136/137Gb for CHS/LBA actually on the drive.
DOS 16bit VFAT partitions *are* limited to 2GB (65536 clusters of 32k)
and some translating CHS BIOSes apparently do have problems wth > 4092
cylinders (according to the notes that came with my 3GB Fireball).
Also some of the software patches to do CHS translation may affect
Linux because the drive geometry may appear differently to Linux and
DOS.
> I am running 2.0.29 and RedHat 4.1. Does anyone know if this limit
> has been re-programmed to something higher, as I was about to get a
> hard drive larger than 2.1gig as an upgrade. Last time I had a
> drive larger than this, my kernel paniked as soon as it polled the
> ide devices and I had to remove the drive from the system just to
> get into Linux (the hard drive in question was not even partitioned
> for Linux, but was used in Windows....I know, dual boot
> *eewwwww*). :)
Well I'm running Redhat 4.0/2.0.28 on a 3GB Fireball without problems.
My system is dual-boot between Linux and Windows 95. Given the
symptoms that you describe it may be a BIOS problem but it's hard to
say given that you haven't said what Kernel version had problems, what
processor/motherboard/bios/bios version you have, nor whether you are
using software to do CHS translation for Windows (eg Ontrack or
EZ-Drive)
Regards
Paul.