Linux makes 30G WD disk confused about its identity

From: Dale Amon (amon@vnl.com)
Date: Sat Mar 25 2000 - 15:48:57 EST

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    Since there is an on going thread on 32G drives, I thought
    it might be a good time to bring up a problem I've been
    having with a 30G Western Digital IDE drive.

    Using the manufacturers DOS boot application, the drive
    info looks like this:

                  C H S MB
    Default 59598 16 63 30760
    Currently 16383 16 63 8455
    Rom BIOS 3740 255 63 30764

    When I boot into Linux it sees the drive at the "current"
    settings, which I believe are getting forced in when
    I use fdisk to create the partition table (cfdisk can't
    deal with it at all until I do this)

    I've tried changing CHS in fdisk and it seems to take
    them... but if I exit and restart the program, everything
    is back to the values in the "Currently" line again. I
    discussed this some weeks ago on linux-hardware and have
    not progressed towards a solution yet.

    Something, somewhere is forcing this drive to think it
    is 8G instead of 30G. It ain't the BIOS, so it seems
    to be driver related or perhaps a failing in fdisk.

    I can kill the partition table, go into the DOS app
    and reset the drive, but it goes right back as soon
    as I boot.

    The system in question is far from a phone line and
    has no external connectivity, so updates are painful.
    But it is running 2.2.14 kernel with debian potato dist
    as of November 1999.

    I tried a 2.3.x kernel as well and that didn't solve
    the problem either, although I limited my tests because
    I was getting some error messages that were worrisome
    and this is not a system I wish to lose a file system
    on!

    ------------------------------------------------------
    Use Linux: A computer Dale Amon, CEO/MD
    is a terrible thing Village Networking Ltd
    to waste. Belfast, Northern Ireland
    ------------------------------------------------------

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