Re: Server upgrade - 128G disk limit!

[Donald Lee <MacPPC2%caution.icompute.com@localhost>]

Thank you all for the quick and helpful response.  This is a great list!

First of all, I looked for firmware upgrades from Apple, and there are
none that I can find.  Apple's docs simply say "don't do that":

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2544

I also looked carefully at the specs for the various G4 models, and
ATA specs, and it *appears* to me that the ATA controllers in the early
G4 models (like mine) are Ultra33 and Ultra66, which would not have
the LBA48 support.  If I'm wrong, it makes my life simpler, so
I will test these hypotheses tomorrow on the HW.

I could have sworn that I already saw evidence that the controllers
do *not* work with blocks beyond 128G, but I will double check.  It
would be much nicer if I could use the on-board controllers.

The CF->IDE adapter is a cool idea. If I can use the ATA card for the
non-boot disks, then using the flash for the root volume makes a lot
of sense.

So far, I have tried to boot with my Sonnet Tempo ATA133 card
(Ultra-Tek133P+), and it doesn't work.  The kernel loads, but after the
disks are discovered, I get the normal boot messages, but:

        [boot stuf... blah blah...]
        wd1: soft error (corrected)
        boot device: <unknown>
        root device: 

At this point, I can type one character, but that's it.  no more
keystrokes are accepted or echoed.  The kernel is alive.  If I
unplug or insert firewire or usb, I sometimes see console messages, but
there is no responding to the "root device:" prompt.

Something is sick.

Tomorrow, I'll go back to the internal bus for the boot volume, and see
if that makes life good.  If I can verify that the disk above 128G is
being accessed properly, then I'm golden.

Thank you all for your help.  I will report back.

-dgl-

>> I bought 2 160G drives, and 1 320G drive, and when I started working with
>> them realized that the G4 has a 128G limit on drives, because the on-board
>> controller does not support LBA48.  (Bummer!) (G4 AGP graphics)
>
>To be clear, the controller does, but the drivers available to OF don't. Just 
>put ofwboot.xcf and the boot kernel into an HFS partition at the beginning of 
>the disk and you'll be fine - as NetBSD boots, it'll load its own driver and 
>will see the full size of the drives.
>
>Running ATA or SATA cards is another issue altogether because you have to find 
>cards which are supported under NetBSD and bootable via Open Firmware. I use a 
>number of ATA cards in various 7600 type machines which are doing NAT and 
>such, but they also have the limited-to-128-gigs-until-kernel-boots issue as 
>well.
>
>Just FYI, if you want to use SATA drives the easiest way to do it is to put 
>them on the main IDE bus via SATA to IDE adapters.
>
>If you want to boot without the kernel on an HFS volume, you could always buy 
>a CF to IDE adapter and put ofwboot.xcf and the kernel on a CF card which has 
>another drive set as the root filesystem.
>
>I've done all this before, so I can say with certainty any of it will work.
>
>John