Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 41350
installer/fdisk fails to recognize large hdd (30GB)
Last modified: 2008-08-01 12:22:51 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Win95; U) Description of problem: The redhat 7.1 installer fails to recognise my large IBM (DTLA 307030) 30GB drive. It only recognises the first 2GB. The system is a gigabyte GA-60XM7E (intl 815e AGPset) motherboard with PIII 733Mhz intel processor, sony cdrom 128MG RAM, Rage mobility (8mb) video card, SB vibra 128 card. 2 Intel ethernet pro 100 cards. Btw this comp. has an award bios v6.00PG (06/09/2000-i815-ITE8712-6A69RG0BC-00) How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.boot from cdrom 2.run install 3. Expected Results: would like redhat to see the entire 30gb drive ! Additional info:
We haven't seen this in any of our testing...I have a couple of 40GB drives in my machines at home that work fine. This is strange behavior. When you are in the installer, press <Ctrl><Alt><F2> and type 'cat /proc/ide/hda/capacity' and post the output of that here.
Capacity shows as 4128768 (for both 7.0 and 7.1 install) The 7.1 install is the same (ie only sees 2GB) for any install including the server and custom install). ie. it see the following geometry 257/255/63) Interestingly, installing 7.0 install does show the entire hard disk drive (ie 30Gb). ie it sees the following logical geometry (3737/255/63) and physical (4096/16/63) geometry. Installing 7.0 with multiple logical partitions (using disk druid) causes the installer to keep over when it encounters say swap at hda8. Have overcome this by installing swap as a primary partition (along with /boot). Trying to upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1 shows an error reading the partition table for the block device hda. The error is - 'no such file or directory'. Whe you retry, the errror is 'success'. Btw. during this install the capacity shown is as above. Bbtw. I have also cleared the partition table and only have rh installed. I currently have a running 7.0 system
When you get the error message in the installer, does the installer crash? If so, can you attach the complete debug message?
No, you keep getting the error msg "success" if you 'retry'..if you choose to 'skip disk' you understandably get the msg 'no valid devices were found...blah blah..' your x server then dies and you are back to where you started... ie reboots and you are back to 7.0.
can you let me know the status of this ?
This looks like a problem with the way the 2.4 kernel handles drive geometry.
Strange.. I have exactly that drive in a machine I installed last week. Does it by chance have a jumper to "clip" the drivesize ?
Have not ckecked jumper existence. However, 7.0 with 2.2 kernal installs and recognises the entire hdd
Strange. Could you try and see if adding "ide=nodma" as option at the syslinux prompt helps? You never know ;)
tried boot: linux ide=nodma this a while ago...once more... no joy. :-) btw. it takes ages to load initrd.img........
should have added that the error was again "an error reading the partition table for the block device hda. theerror was no such file or dir, and a reyt gives the error as success, over and over again". same as described earlier.
Created attachment 20293 [details] traceback
apologies, the above traceback should have contained this note which seems to have got lost... --above tracceback was from trying a fresh install having wiped my 7.0 install and the partition table. 7.1 only recognised the following c/h/s 257/255/63 however from within the install and fdisk using the expert mode I changed to c/h/s of 3737/255/63 ehih is what the disk really is. having created the partitions it bombed out. Seems to have problems with extended partitions...
IBM drives have a jumper to make them clipped to 2Gb. Are you SURE that isn't jumpered ? See http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/dtla/dtlajum.htm for the jumpersettings
Yes, its not jumpereg to clip the drive. However, as stated earlier, rh7.0 installer recognises the entire drive. :-) I have the following workaround. -Start rh7.1 install, then use fdisk from within installer to manually change the cylinders to reflect the correct disk size. -Create 4 partitions (3 primary) including one extended partition. This is important in the scheme of things as anacnoda crashes on more than one extended partition. -Install rh7.1 into root. -Reboot and create extended file systems with remaining disk as required using mke2fs. -Move directories to their own file systems as required. Remembering to make appropriate changes to /etc/fstab -Reboot and you now have a fully utilised disk with th7.1 installed. Would still like the 7.1 installer to pick up the disk info...
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/