Topic: HardDisk Limit 32GB in e·Smith Overruled.

[Confucius]

Hiya All,

because I posted it in dutch I thought it wouldn't be fair to the rest of the world to leave it at that.

All e·Smith lovers love to use big harddisks for sure. Including me (a newbie).

I bought myself a Maxtor 80 GB (5400 RPM) and got into trouble with the Linux kernel. I've found a work-around that can be done by all newbies, no compiling or installation of any patches or other strange things.

You need to make sure you made a bootdisk from the image on the CD and the other thing you need to do is testing if the drive doesn't block the BIOS (when it does, read about clipping in the manual of the disk)

Assuming you connected the drive and the system still wants to start from the harddisk we can go on with the few steps to manage all this.

Step 1 : Make sure that all works perfectly (no lock-ups I mean) and your harddisk is known as the LBA type in the BIOS....

Step 2 : Get EZ-Drive from http://www.maxtor.com and install the 'driver' on the harddisk.

Step 3 : Make sure your BIOS is set to start from drive A: and keep the bootdisk ready. Best BIOS selection for boot-order is A,C,X,X.... etc... who cares about the rest ??

Step 4 : Place the e·Smith CD in the drive (NO you fool, NOT the floppy drive Reboot the system and after the memory count keep the key pressed until you see a nice panel with all your harddisk stats. Now press 'A' and insert the bootdisk and press the key. (sorry, I must be tired

From here the procedure for the normal installation starts and you can do all as usual EXCEPT 1 thing. DON'T switch on the FAST parameter at the (almost) end of the configuration from e·Smith. If you do that you can start all over again... DON'T change it afterwards either. Simply LET IT BE.

Now you have a FULL partition on your 40, 60, 80 or maybe even 100 GB harddisk wich uses the FULL disk, and that was the main purpose of buying bigger disks I think

GoodLuck

[Paul Nesbit]

Confucius wrote:
>
> I bought myself a Maxtor 80 GB (5400 RPM) and got into
> trouble with the Linux kernel. I've found a work-around that
> can be done by all newbies, no compiling or installation of
> any patches or other strange things.

This problem is not a bug in e-smith or a bug the linux kernel employed by e-smith; your system BIOS does not support the capacity of your hard drive.

There are three ways around this limitation, the first of which Confucius has already pointed out.  

1) Set the HD jumpers appropriately and use the MaxBlast Plus software to prepare the hard drive.  

2) Flash the system BIOS, or upgrade motherboard.

3) Install an EIDE card with an onboard BIOS that provides support for large capacity drives.

Regards,
Paul

[Del]

I am about to install e-smith on a 40gig HDD, the motherboard is a new Gigabyte GA-71XE4 with AMD K7-700 processor, 128 meg SDRAM, floppy, CD rom etc. Do I need to do any of these workarounds or will I be OK as the motherboard reconises and supports 40gig plus HDD's? I am not a E-smith or Linux expert, so forgive me if this is a stupid question.
Regards
Del

[g7pkf]

as long as the bios sees a 40Gb hdd (and your system seems new enough to) you should not have any problem. I used 2 80Gb raid 1 with no problem.

[Patrick Basile]

Hello,

I posted a question earlier today about drive space:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=2245.msg7518#msg7518

My question after reading this is that my BIOS is set to 'Auto', not 'LBA';however, the BIOS reports the correct size (20GB) for my drives.  Does this mean the BIOS is recognizing and setting the parameter to LBA?

Secondly, when you guys talk about 'installing' the Maxtor MaxBlast software, what are you actually installing?  Or are you simply saying that the drive(s) should be partitioned and formatted using the MaxBlast disk prior to installation of e-smith?

Thanks.

Regards,
Patrick