RE: [TCLUG:1360] Formatting Partitions for Large disks?

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> Hi:
>
> We just got a 450 PII from Micron with a 10.1 GB hard disk. It was
> partitioned with a 2 GB FAT and 8 GB NTFS partition. We wanted to wipe
> out everything and install Redhat Linux. But somehow, only 8 GB of the
> hard drive is being seen by FDISK. I also remember seeing an error
> message in my NT setup saying that the disk had more than 1024 cylinders.
> Is this the source of the problem? How can I reclaim the lost 2 GB?
>
> I  can provide the fdisk partition table, but it spans from cylinder 0
> to 1023 and seems OK...
>
> Is there some low-level format tool we can use?
>
>
> DIsk druid also can't find the missing 2 GB...
>
> We did install Linux on the 8 GB and the boot messages show that the hard
> drive has 9728 MB available. ALso the BIOS shows 10 GB...
>

	I'm assuming this is an IDE drive -- if so, make sure the BIOS has that
drive set up in LBA mode.  This should, usually, translate the drive
geometry to something below the 1024-cylinder limit (although with a drive
that huge, I'm not really sure.)
	In fact, if the BIOS has an auto-detect feature, you may want to give that
a whirl.  I've occasionally gotten ahold of a computer where somebody set up
the BIOS more or less at random -- the drive size is correct, but the
geometry (cylinders/sectors/heads) is totally, er, non-Euclidean.
Auto-detecting has never failed me yet.
	I believe linux fdisk *should* be able to see past the 1024-cylinder limit
if the disk is set up correctly in the BIOS.  According to everything I can
find, the only real restriction is that your boot information has to be
between cylinders 0-1023.  Again, I've never had to deal with an IDE drive
larger than 2.5 GB, so I really can't say for sure.
	If that doesn't work, I'll gladly trade you your worthless 10GB for an old
850MB disk I'm not using any more...  I guarantee fdisk won't have any
problems with this one.