On Sun, 28 Dec 2003, Tom Mitchell wrote: > On Sat, 27 Dec 2003, Krikket wrote: > > On Sat, 27 Dec 2003, Christopher K. Johnson wrote: > > > Krikket wrote: > > > > > > >Has anyone else had problems getting Fedora to recognize their hard drives > > > >at full capacity? I have a 20 gig drive that the BIOS recognises as .. > > > > How are you checking the disk size under Linux? > > > If as root you enter this command what do you get? > > > > > > dmesg|grep sectors > > > > Odd. That *did* show the full drive. I got the errant value during the > > install. > > Depending on the BIOS and the BIOS settings this initial BIOS > related disk size issue is common. As long as your bootstrap > partition is located in the beginning of the disk (for you, > inside the first 2GB) you will be OK and no change is needed. > i.e. don't fix it -- when it ain't broken. <Snip for space> > >From a western digital support page. > BIOS Dates May not support > prior to drives larger than > Jun 1999 32GB > > Question: > > One thing I do not know is what happens when a file system much > bigger than the BIOS limit is the location of bootstrap code. At > first the initial location on the disk is going to be within the > reach of the BIOS but a later updates on a full disk might place > blocks of data for the new kernel beyond the reach of the BIOS. > I believe the defaults in the auto partition RH code makes this a > non question but still I am curious. > > A rescue Floppy or FC1-Disc1 would boot, but how to recover is > unclear. > > BTW: What are your partitions? > # cat /proc/partitions I ran across the problem when I was using a harddrive that has Suse installed, so ir was probably 512/swap, X/boot 19G/root. Fedora didn't want to recognize those partitions though. I later discovered that it showed *no* partitions on the drive. As there wasn't anything that needed to be saved, I went ahead and repartitioned (and reformatted) the drive. Then, when I next attempted the install, Fedora saw all 20 gig, not just the 2 gig. I have no clue *why* it worked like that, but it did... (I mean, I was repartitioning the harddrive during the install process anyway!) Krikket
