Re: Big drive support

Do your Granite drive bays have the ATA-6 controller in them? We had to be very careful to specifically ask for the ATA-6 controller from Granite when we ordered our disk towers - they did not come with it by default. If memory serves, if you don't specifically ask for that controller, you fall victim to the 137GB limitation.

By the way, you may hit this limit also with some older BIOSs out there as well.

Dave Kletzli

P.S. I still owe some testing results to this list. I've moved recently and haven't gotten to them yet. - DK
>
> Does anyone on this list have actual experience with ATA-6 drives over 128
> gigabyte (binary) 137 gigabyte (decimal) in ide-to-1394 drive adapters?
>
> We have several Granite Digital drive bays and trays, with WDC 200 and
> Maxline II (300 gbyte) drives. For several months I was fairly confident
> that they were working fine, but now I am not so sure.
>
> For testing, I did a default minimal install of RH9 from the store-bought
> CD, ran sfdisk to make a single partition on the 300 gigabyte drive in the
> GD drive bay, and mkfs.ext3 to make a filesystem. Then I copied /usr (less
> than a gig) onto the drive. This ran rapidly and without error messages. A
> cursory examination suggested that the copy was accurate, but when I ran
> e2fsck many errors were found.
>
> For a second trial, I ran RH up2date and repartitioned, formated, etc. At
> the last step e2fsck again found many errors.
>
> For a third trial, I did a default install of Suse 8.2, repartitioned etc.
> Again many errors.
>

> Lastly, ran SUSE update, but still no improvement.
>
> Red Hat uses ohci 1.1 and SBP2 rev 709. The updated Suse installation uses
> version SBP2 version 799).
>
> With the RH9 up2date'd system I also tested other drives mounted in other
> GD trays, and swapped drive bays and cables also. The one constant seemed
> to be that the 10 and 20 gig drives worked, but the 200 and 300 gig drives
> did not.
>
> Granite Digital does not claim any Linux compatibility, but does
> aggressively claim to support ATA-6, and drives over 137 gigabytes.
>
> Another vendor is claiming Linux compatibility (www.cooldrives.com) but
> they only mention Linux with their Oxford 922 based products - not their
> 911 based product. Is that a clue that the GD 911 based product is
> unlikely to work?
>
> The e2fsck error messages included:
>
> duplicate bad blocks
> bad inode number for ... in inode
> bad node ref count
>
> etc. Hundreds of messages on some passes.
>
>
> I can provide a frame, tray and drive (gratis) to the maintainer if that

> would help.
>
> Daniel Feenberg
> feenberg isat nber dotte org
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sat Oct 18 04:23:09 2003