Western Digital indicated that they only used the e-z bios for the first production runs of the Promise controller which did not have 48 bit addressing capability. If it was in use, it would be posted in the bios startup sequence
-- David -----Original Message----- From: David Turetsky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 8:29 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: fstab/mount filesystem nomenclature New development: (in some quarters, called Progress) I chatted on the phone today with WD. Apparently the ~120GB limitation is a consequence of my using native Windows drivers which do not have 48-bit addressing capability and thus cannot address beyond the 120GB limit (I trust you guys on the arithmetic) Apparently when I installed drive 1 (/hde) using the WD utility provided, that installed the 48-bit addressing driver and associated /hde with it. Since I partitioned /hdf entirely with the native Windows partition software, that drive did not have 48 bit addressing support So, from Windows XP, I upgraded the driver, and lo and behold I was now able to see the full 160GB in /hdf, and formatted a third partition under fat32 Now when I look at both drives from linux using cfdisk, I CAN'T SEE EITHER DRIVE!!! Conclusion: cfdisk (and I presume debian in general) does not provide 48 bit support and reaches erroneous conclusions ("Bad primary partition x: Partition begins after end-of-disk", where x=1 for /hde and x=2 for /hdf) I have cfdisk version 2.11n installed. The package version available at the debian site is 2.11n-5+1. I'm not familiar with which drivers provide disk I/O -- David -----Original Message----- From: Pigeon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 4:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: fstab/mount filesystem nomenclature On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 02:54:47AM -0500, David Turetsky wrote: > Pigeon, a postscript. WD has their own BIOS on the Promise controller. > It gets hooked in by the system BIOS and then does it's own thing > without leaving any fingerprints elsewhere > > I will email Western Digital and see if I can get some insight into what > they are doing I had a VERY QUICK look on Google and WD's website, and it seems that: - Linux can get round the 137Gb limit already - WD's solution for Windoze seems to consist of a change to the BIOS on the Promise card and a driver for Windoze. This leads to two possible ideas: - Reinstall the original BIOS on the Promise card, accept the Windoze limitation - Patch the Linux kernel driver module for the Promise card to agree with WD's modified BIOS. I don't know if such a patch exists, but if not it probably will before long. Shame that Linux is being held up by Windoze's failings! Pigeon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
