Topic: Large IDE hard drive

[David]

I am attempting to use a Maxtor 46.1GB (model 94610U6) hard drive with e-smith 4.0.  I have prevoiusly used this hard drive with an old Pentium Pro motherboard that did not recognize drives larger than 32GB, so I had the drive jumpered to limit it's size to 32GB.  I have now upgraded to a newer Pentium II motherboard and flashed it's BIOS to the newest version that does recognize hard drives greater than 32GB.  If I set the BIOS to autodetect the drive, it uses the LBA mode, with 5605 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors, for a size of 46105MB, but the e-smith install crashes at the very end, after copying all of the files.  If I go into the BIOS and set the drive up manually in the large mode, with a geometry of 11166 cylinders, 128 heads, 63 sectors, 46104MB, the e-smith install goes smoothly.  But when I went in after the install, e-smith was only using about 12GB of the drive.  I have also tested this motherboard with the drive jumpered to limit it to 32GB and it works fine.

Has anyone used e-smith with an IDE hard drive larger then 32GB?

Thanks,
David

[David]

I also submitted this problem as a bug to e-smith technical support and received the response that it is an issue of the kernel used during installation, and would be fixed in the upcoming 4.1 release.

I have come up with a solution, although it is unelegant and requires the use of DOS and the Norton Ghost disk duplication program.  I'm know this can be done in linux, but I am not a linux expert (that is why I am using e-smith )

To get around the e-smith 4.0 kernel problem with hard drives >32GB:
1. do a normal install to a drive smaller than 32GB, I used an extremely OLD 1GB drive.
2. after the install completes, replace your CD-ROM drive (probably on the second IDE controller) with your large IDE drive.
3. boot with a DOS/WIN bootable floppy and run Norton Ghost.
4. do a drive to drive duplication.  There are 3 partitions to copy.  The first is the small /boot partition to keep linux in the first 1024 cylinders of the HD.  The second is the linux swap partition and the third is the / root, the rest of the drive.  Keep the size of the first two partitions the same, and allow Ghost to resize the third partition to use the rest of the drive.
5. after the duplication completes, remove the small HD and move the large HD to the primary IDE controller, boot the machine and begin the normal configuration of the e-smith server.

It has worked for me, so let me know if this helps you.

David Phillips
dphillip@rose.net

[robert]

One using maxtor 45 gb with BP6 motherboard (about a year old)

one using maxtor 80 GB with cheap m/b on sale at frye's (wouldn't run NT, that's why it became e-smith