- Toshiba Satellite Pro 420 CDT, hard drive problem
- Posted by Leo on July 2nd, 2003
The drive is a 20GB IBM travelstar, which used to have Linux on it. I
now need to install Win98SE; booting from a Win98 floppy and running
fdisk, the drive only appears to be 16MB. Boot from a Linux floppy and
the drive is 20GB again!
I have put the drive into a desktop and was able to use fdisk to
create a 20GB primary dos partition and format it. Putting the drive
back into the laptop and running fdisk again to show the partition
information resulted in a 20GB partition showing, but still displaying
total disk size as 16MB.
I have also used the IBM Drive Fitness Test software, which correctly
identifies the drive as 20GB; the drive passes all tests and has been
low level formatted and had it's boot sector erased.Various versions
of fdisk have been tried, but always always with the same result; in
the laptop the drive is only 16MB.
The laptop bios is the latest version, not that it makes much
difference, it doesn't display any drive details anyway.
I keep thinking that the problem has to be Linux-related, because the
Linux installation had a 16MB partition on the drive, but I can't
understand why the laptop is seeing only 16MB when nothing else does.
Any ideas?
- Posted by Quaoar on July 2nd, 2003
Leo wrote:
The 420 series BIOS does not support large disks AFIK. This came out of
the box with what, 1.2GB HD? AIRC, the max HD the BIOS would support
was 3GB and that was with a BIOS flash. In order to use a 20GB HD, some
kind of driver overlay is required to get to large partitions. Are you
sure you are not seeing 2GB and 1.6GB?
Q
- Posted by Uwe Graepel on July 2nd, 2003
How was it possible that Linux ran well with all the 20 GB on that machine
as he mentioned?
Regards,
Uwe
- Posted by Henry B Jobin on July 2nd, 2003
lets wait till the origional question has been succesfully answered and then
I might offer the explaination.
Henry
"Uwe Graepel" <usenet.reply@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:bdvf4b$11ese7$1@ID-146983.news.dfncis.de...
- Posted by Barry Watzman on July 3rd, 2003
That is incorrect; the 4xx series, although vintage 1997, does support
drives larger than 3-4 gigs natively with the latest BIOS. However,
that doesn't mean that it will go to 20 gigs. I don't know what the
limit is, however I do know that I've had 6 and 10 gig drives in
machines from that series with no problems, and not using drive overlay
software.
Quaoar wrote:
- Posted by Henry B Jobin on July 3rd, 2003
Linux doesnt write or read through the bios i/o calls !
Henry
"Uwe Graepel" <usenet.reply@gmx.de> wrote in message
news:bdvf4b$11ese7$1@ID-146983.news.dfncis.de...
- Posted by Leo on July 3rd, 2003
"Henry B Jobin" <hbjobin@prodigy.net> wrote in message news:<zYAMa.973$OU5.560@newssvr31.news.prodigy.com >...
Thanks for the input so far. I've already tried fdisk/mbr, but
unfortunately that doesn't work either. As regards bios limitations,
I'm fairly sure that an earlier install of Win98, prior to the Linux
install, recognised the whole drive. Also, if it was the bios, why
16MB?
Having said that, in the bios there are two options for HDD Mode,
Enhanced IDE (Normal) and Standard IDE; changing from Enhanced to
Standard in the bios results in fdisk seeing 504MB instead of 16MB.
Now, 504MB is the original IDE/BIOS limitation, so that makes sense,
but the EIDE seeing 16MB doesn't.
Incidentally, fdisk does ask if LBA should be enabled, which infers
that it knows that it is a large disk.
- Posted by Uwe Graepel on July 3rd, 2003
In fact I'm not a Linux specialist at all. So you might be right although it
sounds pretty strange to me that Linux shll not be bound to the BIOS.
However, I own a SatellitePro 440CDT which runs excellent with a 20 GB
toshiba harddrive.
Regards,
Uwe
- Posted by Leo on July 3rd, 2003
"Quaoar" <jwglasspeAT@comcastDOT.net> wrote in message news:<TMWdncqtJI8EtJmiU-KYvA@comcast.com>...
BIOS is 5.40, which is the latest. Before last BIOS upgrade it was
5.30; the problem was exactly the same and flashing 5.40 hasn't made
any difference.
- Posted by Peter T. Breuer on July 3rd, 2003
In comp.os.linux.misc Uwe Graepel <usenet.reply@gmx.de> wrote:
No o/s has used the bios for i/o for something like 8 years. What
strange about it? I think msdos was the last o/s to use the bios for
i/o.
The sentence is meaningless.
Peter
- Posted by Peter T. Breuer on July 3rd, 2003
In comp.os.linux.misc Uwe Graepel <usenet.reply@gmx.de> wrote:
My sentence means something. It means that yours is meaningless.
Therefore your last statement is untrue. Therefore you are lying.
Peter
- Posted by mjt on July 3rd, 2003
John-Paul Stewart wrote:
..... the magic number is usu within the first 1024 cylinders
..
--
/// Michael J. Tobler: motorcyclist, surfer, skydiver, \\\
\\\ and author: "Inside Linux", "C++ HowTo", "C++ Unleashed" ///
\\\ http://pages.sbcglobal.net/mtobler/mjt_linux_page.html ///
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the
stupidity of your action.
