[97780] in RedHat Linux List
Re: Seagate 8.4 gig drive
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jose M. Sanchez)
Thu Nov 5 00:02:23 1998
From: "Jose M. Sanchez" <opjose@ex-pressnet.com>
To: <redhat-list@redhat.com>
Cc: <elazor@hcs.state.or.us>
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 00:13:29 -0500
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Lazor <elazor@hcs.state.or.us>
To: redhat-list@redhat.com <redhat-list@redhat.com>
Date: Wednesday, November 04, 1998 2:12 PM
Subject: RE: Seagate 8.4 gig drive
>
>Ok, that didn't work but it was worth a try. I went in and created dos
>partitions on all three drives that were 15megs in size. During the
>process, I noticed that DOS only saw 504megs of drive space - ie. the 1024
>cyl. limit). I booted from the linux boot disk and went into the install,
>tried things again and it didn't work. I tried to collect as much
>information as possible. Here's what I've noticed:
>
Yeah your controller is not translating the drive geometry at all...
otherwise the fdisk could have handled a larger partition...
>- Every time I've booted, I can do alt-f4 and I'll see the error message:
>
> 4> Partition check
> 4> hda:hda: set_multmode: status=0X51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
> 4> hda: set_multmode: error=0X04 { DriveStatusError }
>
Yeap, the DriveReady/Seek complete error occurs as the system trys to init
the drives. It begins by seeking from the highest cylinder to the lowest
(also know as a recalibration...) Since the drive parameters are all wrong
the seek is never completing in the number of "steps" (cylinders) the
controller/bios expects... and the controller times out, thinking that the
heads are at the zero cylinder but not getting a Zero detect from the drive
electronics..
>- If I let the system bios autodetect the hard drive, I get into fdisk
> and find that it thinks there are 1024 cyl, 255 heads, 63 sect.
>
>- If I manually set the drive geometry in bios to 16383,16,63, I get into
> fdisk and find that it thinks that there are 16676 cyl, 16 heads, 63
>sectors.
>
>- When 1st booting off of the floppy, at the boot: prompt I tried typing
in:
>
> linux hda=16383,16,63
> vmlinux hda=16363,16,63
> linux ide1=16383,16,63
>
> None of those seemed to help.
>
The bios is attempting to deal with the drive geometry when it assigned it
1024 cyls... the controller itself is not helping things though. This must
be an old pentium or 486 system right?
You might have to create an initial partition that falls well within what
the controller/bios reports... AFTER booting Linux, giving linux what the
BIOS sees as the drive geometry at the lilo prompt.
If you do this you should be able to get a MBR which will work correctly
with Linux. If you can get at least this far, lilo can be made to "enter"
the drive geometry correctly for you at boot.
Use the 1024 cyls manually entered when you start linux...
Put the root and the swap partition within the first 500 megs, then you
should be able to use the rest of the drive for other partitions...
-JMS
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