Many large drives have an option to limit their size to 32M for
compatibility with older BIOS'.  I recently purchased a 46.1G IBM drive for
my early-98 system which isn't able to cope with drives larger than 32M.
Since I don't boot from the drive, I kept the BIOS ignorant of it, and the
kernel properly detects it at the full size.

I'd recommend checking for the presence of a "32M Limit" or "15 head limit"
jumper on the drive itself, and removing it.

    ScottE

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Gillham" <gillham@vaultron.com>
To: "Manuel Bouyer" <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
Cc: "Andrew Gillham" <gillham@vaultron.com>; <port-i386@netbsd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 13, 2000 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: Drive size limitation?


> Manuel Bouyer writes:
> >
> > Maybe it's a formatted vs non-formatted issue ?
> > I know peoples which uses bigger drives with NetBSD, without problems
...
> > So I think the drive really reports only 32253MB. What does the BIOS
says ?
>
> Hmm, it occurs to me that my buddy probably hasn't updated the BIOS since
> I initially helped him install the box.  Potentially he has an older BIOS
> that doesn't support a disk larger than 30GB.
> As this 40GB isn't the boot disk, I wouldn't think that would matter.
> Can the BIOS affect what the drive reports for 'atactl wd1 identify' or
> is that really from the drive?  What I mean is that if the BIOS only
> supports 30GB will the drive and the BIOS "agree" on the value that
> the drive will report via identify?
>
> This seems odd to me, but anyway, I'll have him check the BIOS information
> and update it as well.
>
> -Andrew
>