Adding 2nd Hard Drive - 9729 Limit?

lesc

I added a 2nd hard drive (80 GB) and attempted fdisk. The 80 GB drive has
38309 cylinders but fdisk reports cylinders set at 9729. How can I get the
max disk space with fdisk reporting a limit of 9729 cylinders?
Fdisk reports:

Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF
disklabel. Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory
only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous
content won't be recoverable.

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 9729.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by
w(rite)

Command (m for help):

-Les-
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Ben2040 · Guru Joined: 07 May 2003 Posts: 445 Location: UK

Hi

Have you tried just making a partition on the disk and seeing if it is the right size? eg fdisk is just saying something wrong but it is still actually working correctly.

Ben

UncleTom · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2003 2:16 pm Post subject:

I've had this with every system I installed gentoo on and it never caused any harm just to ignore this message. I think it is only a problem with old software.

Good Luck :wink:

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bug, n: A son of a glitch.

percking · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Jul 2003 Posts: 90

How old is your mb? it might not have the capability to see that big of drive? you can go into your bios and tell it not to look for that drive and just let the kernel find the drive at boot. I had to do this with one of my older systems.

percking

UncleTom · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2003 3:01 pm Post subject:

My home system is about 1 year old and my pc at work is a brand new dell machine. You don't get this message on old hardware only. I've never tried to tell the bios not to look for the drive because as I said, I've never had any troubles connected with that message.
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bug, n: A son of a glitch.

delta407 · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2003 4:39 pm Post subject:

Modern drives are way more complex than cylinders and heads and all that. You can almost invariably ignore those numbers.

(BTW, to see if fdisk actually sees the whole disk, try making a 78 GB partition. It should let you.)
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BradN · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2003 6:05 pm Post subject:

If in doubt about bios disk size support, just make sure your /boot partition fits in the first 512MB of the disk, and nearly ANY system will be able to use the whole disk in linux (the kernel manages disk access itself once it's loaded). The only problem I've seen is a compaq 386 BIOS that locks up, and after a huge delay, disables the controller on huge disks.