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
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