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ecosta
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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 Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 1:59 pm Post subject: Disk size not recognised... bypass the BIOS? |
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Hi all,
I bought a 500GB ATA disk to use on my old box but of course, the BIOS can't seem to handle drives larger than 33GB.
Is there a way for fdisk/sdisk to ignore the BIOS settings and recognise the drives for what they are?
I thought I had managed that previously but if I did, I forgot how! 
Can you help?
-Ed
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i92guboj
Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 10315
Location: Córdoba (Spain)
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| Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 2:32 pm Post subject: Re: Disk size not recognised... bypass the BIOS? |
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| ecosta wrote: | Hi all,
I bought a 500GB ATA disk to use on my old box but of course, the BIOS can't seem to handle drives larger than 33GB.
Is there a way for fdisk/sdisk to ignore the BIOS settings and recognise the drives for what they are?
I thought I had managed that previously but if I did, I forgot how!
Can you help?
-Ed |
As far as I know, linux doesn't use the BIOS info to determine de actual geometry of your drive. Sorry if this is too basic, but are you sure that the drive has no jumper on it to auto-limit itself to that capacity?
You could also try to upgrade the BIOS, but I don't think that your problem is really the BIOS at all. |
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ecosta
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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| Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 2:54 pm Post subject: |
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Hi,
Thanks for your answer. Here is the info I can give when away from the box.
The only jumpers on the disk are to determin if its a master or slave.
Oddly enough, fdisk sees the disk the same way the BIOS does, like if they where 33GB
I'd love to flash the BIOS but it seems I'll need a floppy and a windows box to make the floppy disk... and it probably won't work
I tried to force the CHS in fdisk and sfdisk but that didn't change a thing. Creating a partition doesn't suddenly change things I'm afraid.
Any more thoughts? Anything is better than nothing
-Ed
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i92guboj
Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 10315
Location: Córdoba (Spain)
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| Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 3:02 pm Post subject: |
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| ecosta wrote: |
I'd love to flash the BIOS but it seems I'll need a floppy and a windows box to make the floppy disk... and it probably won't work
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Not really, download a freedos floppy image, dump it with dd into a floppy, and then use the instructions of your motherboard manufacturer on how to modify the boot floppy to flash your bios (or just boot on it and flash it manually, for that you will need to copy the bios image and the flash utility into the floppy as well).
http://www.freedos.org/
| Code: |
wget http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/fdboot.img
dd if=fdboot.img of=/dev/fd0
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By the way, what kernel are you using? |
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ecosta
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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| Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 4:23 pm Post subject: |
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well, the dumb board manufacturer only offer an exe that only extracts to a floppy... now you see why I am stuck on the BIOS update.
As for the kernel version, whatever version is on the liveCD (gentoo on kubuntu.
Any thoughts.
-Ed
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i92guboj
Bodhisattva
Joined: 30 Nov 2004
Posts: 10315
Location: Córdoba (Spain)
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| Posted: Wed Nov 07, 2007 5:14 pm Post subject: |
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| ecosta wrote: | well, the dumb board manufacturer only offer an exe that only extracts to a floppy... now you see why I am stuck on the BIOS update.
As for the kernel version, whatever version is on the liveCD (gentoo on kubuntu.
Any thoughts.
-Ed |
There's still a chance you can extract something from that exe using unzip or unshield, both in portage. It is strange they don't provide the roms and dos based tools to upgrade your BIOS. Doing so in windows is not the best practice at all. |
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cyrillic
Watchman
Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 7313
Location: Groton, Massachusetts USA
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| Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 1:22 am Post subject: Re: Disk size not recognised... bypass the BIOS? |
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| ecosta wrote: | | Is there a way for fdisk/sdisk to ignore the BIOS settings and recognise the drives for what they are? |
Try booting with "hda=stroke" to see the full disk capacity.
I am not sure if this works with the newer libata drivers, but it should work with the older IDE drivers. |
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ecosta
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Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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| Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 8:05 am Post subject: |
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Argh! Wish I had seen this last night... now I'll have to wait until I get back home.
I'll let you know how I did. Many thanks for the tip.
-Ed
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ecosta
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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| Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 4:03 pm Post subject: |
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Hi all,
This is what I get from the Gentoo LiveCD:
dmesg
ide_setup: hda=stroke -- BAD OPTION
This is the command I used:
| Code: | | gentoo-nofb hda=stroke |
I get the same error using the Kubuntu LiveCD on Kernel 2.6.17
Any thoughts?
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cyrillic
Watchman
Joined: 19 Feb 2003
Posts: 7313
Location: Groton, Massachusetts USA
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| Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 2:39 am Post subject: |
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| ecosta wrote: | dmesg
ide_setup: hda=stroke -- BAD OPTION |
Hmmm,
I guess this is an old option that is no longer present in recent kernels. |
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ecosta
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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| Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2007 8:46 am Post subject: |
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Well,
I had a look arround before blindely implementing hda=stroke and I found a reference in the Gentoo LiveCD for a 2.6.x Kernel and a reference in the Large Disk HOWTO saying that hda=stroke was implemented as of 2.6.7.
These changes to the kernel seem pretty recent. I can't imagine they already phased it out.
I'll keep you updated. Don't hesitate to post a comment if you have one. 
-Ed
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ecosta
Guru
Joined: 09 May 2003
Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 5:08 pm Post subject: |
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No go!
I tried various forms, read that 'nolvm2' might solve the problem but it didn't. Does anyone have a clue or am I going to have to buy a PCI RAID card to see my 500GB drives?
Any ideas are welcome!
-Ed
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ecosta
Guru
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| Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2007 12:19 pm Post subject: |
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Hi,
Can anyone help me? I'd really like not to have to buy a card to view my disks :\
I can't imagine why hdx=stroke would be removed without being replaced...
Your thoughts?
-Ed
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flybynite
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Joined: 06 Dec 2002
Posts: 620
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| Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 3:39 am Post subject: |
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| ecosta wrote: | Hi,
Can anyone help me? I'd really like not to have to buy a card to view my disks :\
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This is an interesting but frustrating problem, I know.
Is it that you can't make one big partition of 500gb or you can't boot the box because it hangs?
I ask because this is the old problem that created the need for a small boot partition in the front of your disk smaller than the bios limit. The bios reads this partition and boots linux in this small partition without the bios even knowing the rest of the disk exists. Having this small boot partition is just a requirement of old bios's. You don't loose any space, most boxes should have several partitions anyway.
Linux kernel shouldn't need the bios so once booted the whole disk should be usable. Just be aware that other popular (broken) OS's may not be able to deal with this setup so no dual booting is possible.
In theory you just make a small partition in the first <33gb and boot to it. If you can't get the disk to format then make that partition big enough to hold a rescue linux sized system which only needs a kernel and fdisk. |
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ecosta
Guru
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Posts: 477
Location: Brussels,BE
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| Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 6:26 pm Post subject: |
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Hi flybynite,
Your answer came just a tad too late as I just bought a PCI IDE controller. I never realized that I could continue adding partitions once booting of the disk.
I would have given it a try had I had a minute.
Many thanks for the feedback!
-Ed
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Installing Gentoo
