Breaking the 137GB barrier (LBA48)

T. Nifty Hat Mitchell mitch48 at sbcglobal.net
Fri Jun 25 18:10:57 UTC 2004


On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 07:43:44PM +0200, Roger Bendheim wrote:
> 
>    The   Linux   documentation   for   version  7.3  states  that  kernel
>    2.4.18 supports LBA48 (harddisks over 137GB).
> 
>    Nevertheless,  my  Fedora  Core 2 installation is not able to see more
>    than 137GB of my new WD2000BJ disk   = : - (
> 
>    I know it is not a hardware problem, because the full disk is known to
>    BIOS and to a Windows 2000 SP4 installation.

How is your BIOS set for this disk (AUTO, LBA, CHS)?
If it is AUTO set it to LBA and retry.

Read the dual boot threads if you intend to multi boot with WindowZ,
now or in the future.

With large disks it is valuable to place a small /boot partition (about
400MB) at the beginning of the disk.  This permits the OS to boot via
simple BIOS hooks from blocks at the beginning of the disk that any
BIOS can handle. The issue of block addressing is thus postponed until
after the kernel has been loaded at which time the kernel should see
the entire disk.  This is done by windows.. just hidden.

On large disks it is a very good idea to have at least four partitions
/boot, /, swap, /home.  Others sysadmins add /opt or /local.  Below is
a df output of a kitchen sink installation of FC2 so you might make
your own size decisions based on "Used" numbers.

    # df -h
    Filesystem            Size  Used   Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/hda2              15G  6.6G    7.2G  48% /
    /dev/hda1             2.0G   36M    1.8G   2% /boot
    none                  253M     0    253M   0% /dev/shm
    /dev/hda5            1011G   36M 1009.7G   1% /home

Do not ignore /tmp and /var/tmp space requirements (see also $TMPDIR).  

This is a new box so accounting and log files on the above box are
tiny at this point.  Factor in room for LOG files too.  I compress
logs on this box but here is a size hint.  /var/log/messages
compresses by 85% for me.

   # du -s /var/log
   17504   /var/log

For swap there is no special need to be too generous ... swap to files
permits expansion of swap if you discover you need more at a later
time.  Swap has been discussed before, so, start another thread if you
want to discuss swap after searching the archives.



-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	/dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.





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