Re: Larger than 8 gig IDE drives

[Jukka A Andberg <jaandber%cs.Helsinki.FI@localhost>]

On Sat, 3 Mar 2001, John Klos wrote:

> Having just bought a 75 gig IDE drive, I'm curious about how I might use
> the whole capacity with NetBSD.

I just got a 20G one and ran to the same thing. I think I managed
to get it to work, but I haven't really used it yet so take care.

> At the moment, I get the following:
> sd1 at scsibus0 target 1 lun 0: <IBM-DTLA, -307075, TXAO> SCSI2 0/direct fixed
> sd1: 8063 MB, 16383 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 16514064 sectors
                ==========================
I used the wd-driver and got the same values for these three ones
but with a final sector count that indicated the real capacity of
the drive. This was even the same sector count as reported on the
manufacturer's page.

> Now, I assume that I'd need an RDB on this disk that has a more
> appropriate geometry. Or is there any way that I could create a disklabel
> and filesystems that NetBSD will recognise later?

I used HDToolbox (on amigaos) to partition the drive. It of
course found only 8.5G worth of sectors but forcing the number of
cylinders up to the value of totalsectors/1008 did the trick
(1008=16*63=sectors/cyl). I was then able to partition the
full capacity of the drive and initialize the partitions from NetBSD.