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Date:      Thu, 4 Feb 1999 21:00:35 -0600 (CST)
From:      Avalon Books <avalon@advicom.net>
To:        Tony Overfield <tony@dell.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Unable to newfs HD >10G with 3.0
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9902042047240.25131-100000@vespucci.advicom.net>
In-Reply-To: <3.0.6.32.19990204131321.00793ec0@bugs.us.dell.com>

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   Perhaps some clarifications are in order...

On Thu, 4 Feb 1999, Tony Overfield wrote:

> 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.

   I beg to differ. PC hardware is what I do for a living, and this 8.4
Gbyte *standard* is a big deal to my state, federal and
institutional contracts. For these non-standard implementations to be
accepted, we have to jump though extra hoops (i.e. testing). Its rarely a
problem to get them accepted as only a few BIOS's/drive firmware's are
behind the curve so far as to fail our testing.
 
> >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.
>

   Essentially correct. To the BIOS, its just another big block device.
But getting that block device to translate into a useable form has had its
problems. Ask Fujitsu and Samsung about the firmware nightmare they went
through last year...
 
> >   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.

   This makes perfect sense. We have a great deal more trouble from
idiosyncratic drive firmware than motherboard BIOS's. Sometimes things
just don't translate like they should, and the O/S's have no choice but to
"give up" on a drive with broken firmware. Its not the O/S's fault, of
course, but all you can do is swap the drive for one that works properly.

--R. Pelletier
Sys Admin, House Galiagante
We are a Micro$oft-free site


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