Re: My disk has shrunk?

[Lars Nordlund <lars.nordlund%hem.utfors.se@localhost>]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:19:53 +0200
Bernd Ernesti <netbsd%lists.veego.de@localhost> wrote:

> Did you enter the BIOS and changed some 'RAID' settings?
> I had the same problem after I did that. See my mail from 18 Apr 2006 to 
> current users.
> 
> The disk was 2113 sectors shorter after I did that.
> 
> There is some atapi command to reduce the size of the disk permanently and it 
> seems
> that the bios reserves some sectors for the raid information at the end of 
> the disk.

Ok, so I guess a good guideline for SATA disk usage is to not use the
end of the disk for important filesystems.

Or perhaps play around with RAID and carefully inspect the amount of
cylinders/sectors and verify that the disk has shrunk once before
starting to use it for important data.

Or take regular backups to a backup disk _in another computer_.. :-)

Anyway, I have toggled all SATA/IDE/RAID settings I can find in the
BIOS but the last cylinders are not shown for NetBSD. I did not play
with these settings before the "shrink event", so I guess that
something happened before or during the hang+restart I wrote about
earlier.


Best regards,
        Lars Nordlund