Thanks for describing what you did. It will be usefull for
the future as these large disks are common now.
You could have also just used expert mode of fdisk and passed the
disk geometry numbers to fdisk.
If you plan on dual booting NT with large disks then you need to
make sure that the NT boot partition is <=2gb . If you do not
do this then neither lilo or partition magic will be able to boot
NT. System Commander is able to however. Partition magic is reported
to be able to boot if one gets the new version 4.0 .
-connie
>
>
> This is a report (with solution) of my experiences formating
> a large IDE drive with FNAL Linux 5.0.2.
>
> The machine was a Gateway 2000 E-4200 with a 14.1 GB IBM
> drive and 128 MB memory. I originally installed Linux without any
> special options or selections, and it formated my ~14 GB drive as
> only 8 GB. Checking with DOS's fdisk, the BIOS setup, and looking
> at the boot line:
>
> hda: IBM-DTTA-371440, 13783MB w/462kB Cache, CHS=1024/255/63, UDMA
>
> confirmed that I really did have a big disk but that it wasn't
> formated very efficiently. The web page:
>
> http://linux-rep.fnal.gov/howtos/mini/Large-Disk.html
>
> was helpful in understanding the problem but not specific enough
> to help me figure out a solution with my level of experience. At
> Chris Green's suggestion I did the following:
>
> From the boot: prompt of the install disk, I typed
>
> linux mem=128M hda=1757,255,63
>
> rather than the standard <enter> to begin install. The "mem=128M"
> bit is because my machine also has 128M memory and Linux 2.0.35
Linux gets its memory size from the bios. I think this has been fixed
in kernel 2.1[2] . Which of course we will be using in the future.
> apparently only easily recognizes up to 64 MB memory. The magic
> number 1757 comes from the following. When running Linux's fdisk,
> it reports:
>
> Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes
>
> Multiplying this out for the original 1024 cylinders gives 7.8 GB,
> consistent with the original Linux format size. To get the number
> of cylinders with these units to use for my 13783 MB disk,
>
> (13783 * 1024^2 bytes on disk)
> 1757 cylinders = --------------------------------
> (16065 * 512 bytes per cylinder)
>
> and round down.
>
> I proceeded with the standard install, using fdisk to partition the
> new drive. It warned me about the 1757 cylinders but otherwise
> was quite happy to use them. The / partition (or at least a /boot
> partition) should fit under 1024 cylinders, but this was no problem
> in my case for a 1 GB / partition.
>
> Near the end of the install, for the LILO Installation, it asked if
> I wanted any additional boot parameters, with scary messages about
> leaving this alone if I wasn't sure about what to put. I still
> wasn't sure, but I specified
>
> hda=1757,255,63 mem=128M
>
> Note that this does not include the "linux" from the line to start
> the install process for the big disk. Now it boots happy as
> a clam with the message
>
> hda: IBM-DTTA-371440, 13783MB w/462kB Cache, CHS=1757/255/63, UDMA
>
> 'df' reports a big disk, although the total blocks listed doesn't
> quite agree with Used+Available. The percentages are Used/(Used+Avail).
>
> Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
> /dev/hda2 1018329 347299 618418 36% /
> /dev/hda3 12314675 14 11674873 0% /h5a
>
> The numbers reported by fdisk are larger than these though:
>
> Device Boot Begin Start End Blocks Id System
> /dev/hda1 1 1 33 265041 82 Linux swap
> /dev/hda2 * 34 34 164 1052257+ 83 Linux native
> /dev/hda3 165 165 1757 12795772+ 83 Linux native
>
> So perhaps some additional tweaking could get me another couple
> hundred MB, but for now most of my big disk is nicely formatted
> and I think I understand how to do it again in the future.
>
> Thanks again to everyone who helped figure this out.
>
> Stephen
>
>
>
>
-connie