On Wed, Feb 12, 2003 at 08:29:01PM -0500, David Turetsky wrote: > 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)
>From looking around on the linux-kernel archives it seems that 48-bit support is around from kernel 2.4.18, and there's more in 2.4.20, but with odd problems with certain controllers, including certain Promise ones. I also found a few reports of people who didn't expect 48-bit to work finding that it did, with recent 2.4 kernels and Maxtor drives or in one instance apparently a 180Gb WD drive. It looks to me as if Windoze on its own, or Linux on its own, would be fine. But in combining the two, they handle 48-bit differently, and so produce incompatible partition tables. I don't suppose it'll be too long before Linux gains support for these partition tables. In the meantime, I think your best bet is to have one drive purely for Linux, one purely for Windoze, and a third, smaller drive common to both so you can share files with it. Alternatively, you could put both your 160Gb drives in a separate Linux box with a fast Ethernet card and use that, headless, as a fileserver to your main box. > 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 I think all versions of cfdisk would behave the same. What kernel version have you got (what does uname -r say) ? Pigeon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]