How to change LBA48 addressing capability

[Bill Crawford]

2008/7/8 Dan Hensley <dan at dshensley.com>:
> I recently sent an inquiry to this list about fdisk being unable to seek
> one of my two basically identical disks.  Both are Western Digital 250Gb
> disks.
>
> Unable to seek on /dev/sdb
>
> This disk operates just fine when booting Fedora Core 6.  However, as
> soon as I boot Fedora 9, I get the above error.  testdisk seems to
> think /dev/sdb is only 137gb, and hdparm confirms something strange.

There are two other possibilities: a jumper on the drive is "clipping"
its capacity, and / or the presence of a "host protected area"
effectively doing the same thing. Check for jumpers on the drive, see
if the "libata.ignore_hpa=1" option is still supported by the current
kernel.