From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Feb 4 11:13:58 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA04951 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Thu, 4 Feb 1999 11:13:58 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from bugs.us.dell.com (bugs.us.dell.com [143.166.169.147]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA04946 for ; Thu, 4 Feb 1999 11:13:56 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tony@dell.com) Received: from ant (ant.us.dell.com [143.166.12.34]) by bugs.us.dell.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA06088; Thu, 4 Feb 1999 13:13:23 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from tony@dell.com) Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.19990204131321.00793ec0@bugs.us.dell.com> X-Sender: tony@bugs.us.dell.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.6 (32) Date: Thu, 04 Feb 1999 13:13:21 -0600 To: Avalon Books From: Tony Overfield Subject: Re: Unable to newfs HD >10G with 3.0 Cc: FreeBSD Hackers In-Reply-To: References: <199902031917.OAA20775@geek.grf.ov.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 08:35 PM 2/3/99 -0600, Avalon Books wrote: > However. EIDE itself is another matter. Based on drive geometry and >sector addressing limitation, the official EIDE spec ends around 8.4 >Gbytes This is true. >--anything bigger than that is a non-standard implementation. This is false. All newer PC's implement the same INT 13 BIOS extensions to get around the original INT 13 BIOS's 8.4 GB limitation. >Note >that most of the newer PC's don't seem to have much problem with this at >the hardware level, and most of these non-standard drive appear to work >as advertised. The newer PC's work fine because they all implement the same spec to solve the problem. There isn't a problem at the hardware level either because nothing has changed at the hardware level to support more than 8.4 GB. > Operating systems don't think that some of these non-standard >implementations are very funny, as turning a hard drive into a large >number of blocks into a logical volume is not as easy as it sounds, and >this can be made much more difficult when manufacturers start cutting >corners on drive firmware... This makes no sense. Most older operating systems do not support the BIOS extensions, but that's simply because they need to be updated, not because anything funny is going on. Once the OS is booted, it's up to the OS to support the drive's capacity, and nothing funny needs to happen there either, until we get past 137 GB, which should happen within a few years. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message