Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 16:40:22 +0100 From: Simon Bennet <support@natsoft.com.au> To: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: FreeBSD Partition Over 2048 Mega Bytes Message-ID: <33F86CE6.6334@natsoft.com.au>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
I run National Software Pty Ltd (NATSOFT), an Australian company which develops Business Accounting Software. Of NATSOFT's 500+ clients there are currently 15 sites running FreeBSD versions 2.1.6 to 2.2.2. I previously used SCO Xenix/Unix and st this point in time I see no reason why not to stay with FreeBSD, in preferance to SCO, and I plan to have many more commercial FreeBSD sites running in the future. However I have encountered a couple of problems someone may be able to help me with. I am attempting to install FreeBSD 2.2.2-RELEASE on a Pentium 150MHz with a 3Gig IDE Hard Drive. When you run the bad block scan (bad144), at install time, it fails at the 2048 MByte point with every block past there being reported as an error. This happens whether the drive is in LBA or NORMAL mode. Please note that MSDOS cannot have a partition greater than 2048MByte, this is only possible with the lasest version of windows. Will FreeBSD support a single partition over 2048MBytes in length, or is this just a problem with the bad block scanning program? Also if you scan an IDE hard drive over 512MByte without LBA mode (not all computers have LBA mode), then the bad block table gets written above the 512MByte boundry (1024cylinder) making the drive unbootable. Is there a way to get the bad track table to reside below cylinder 1024, or is it safe not to use bad blocking on large IDE drives? I have been running a test on a 2.5GB IDE Drive in a Intel 486/66 with FreeBSD 2.2.2-RELEASE to see if a partition over 2048MBytes works ok. The kernel used was as loaded onto the system from the CD-ROM. I was creating a file large enough to fill the 2.5GB partition, using the c write() function wtiting 1024 bytes of data per write call, when the IDE drive started to spin down and then up again, the drive continued to spin down and up as though it was being turned off and back on again. There were error messages displayed on the console, but unfortunately I did not write them down. I reset the computer system and then the hard drive failed to boot with DRIVE NOT READY, all partition information had been lost and I had to reinstall FreeBSD, therefore I could not consult the log file for error messages. Is there a way FreeBSD can cause a hard drive to spin down and backup again continually or have I encountered a hardware problem? I did rebuild a kernel with FAILSAFE set and ran the above program again, and everything worked ok this time, indicating that FreeBSD can handle the large partition. Thanking you in advance. Regards Craig. National Software Pty Ltd -------------------------
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?33F86CE6.6334>