Problems with Maxtor 120 GB drive

Problems with Maxtor 120 GB drive

[Jay Denebeim]

I realize this isn't the right place to be asking this, but people
here are very helpful and it's the only place I could think of to ask.

I just purchased a Maxtor 120GB MXTL01P120 hard drive and when I tried
to install it with Redhat it wrote over the partition table describing
it as only 8GB.  I tried doing linux rescue and lilo complained that
the physical and logical disk sizes did not match (logical was the
correct size, physical was the 8GB).

Any idea what could be causing this?

Jay

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Re: Problems with Maxtor 120 GB drive

[Stuart Longland]

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Jay Denebeim wrote:

> I just purchased a Maxtor 120GB MXTL01P120 hard drive and when I tried
> to install it with Redhat it wrote over the partition table describing
> it as only 8GB.  I tried doing linux rescue and lilo complained that
> the physical and logical disk sizes did not match (logical was the
> correct size, physical was the 8GB).

I'm no guru here, but as far as I know, 8GB will be about all you'll see 
without using logical block addressing (LBA).  Using the lba32 option in 
your lilo.conf might help.

- -- 
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Brisbane Mesh Node: 719             http://stuartl.cjb.net/ |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| Griffith Student No:           Course: Bachelor/IT (Nathan) |
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
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Re: Problems with Maxtor 120 GB drive

[Jay Denebeim]

In article <slrnbohfu7.1mb.denebeim@hotblack.deepthot.org>, Jay Denebeim wrote:

> I just purchased a Maxtor 120GB MXTL01P120 hard drive and when I tried
> to install it with Redhat it wrote over the partition table describing
> it as only 8GB.  I tried doing linux rescue and lilo complained that
> the physical and logical disk sizes did not match (logical was the
> correct size, physical was the 8GB).
> 
> Any idea what could be causing this?

I ended up getting a good answer to this question.  Thanks to everyone
who answered, especially Stuart Longland who gave me the right answer.

I'm not sure precisely what caused this.  It probably has something to
do with the BIOS I suppose.  I don't know how this part of the kernel
works.

Anyway, to fix the problem is had to give lba32 as a kernel option
when booting the kernel.  That upped my max from 8GB to 32GB.  The
other thing I had to do was make my new drive the master and the old
drive the slave.  That allowed the system to see all the drive.

Is should be noted that I have a new motherboard in this system.  The
old 20Gig drive was exibiting the same 8Gig problem without the LBA32
switch. So it must be the BIOS that is the problem.  It's an AMI bios,
and unfortunately the machine belongs to my SO so I can't type the
version at the moment.

Hope this helps someone in the future
Jay

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Re: Problems with Maxtor 120 GB drive

[Jay Denebeim]

In dt.kernel, you wrote:
> In article <slrnbohfu7.1mb.denebeim@hotblack.deepthot.org>, Jay Denebeim wrote:
> 
>> I just purchased a Maxtor 120GB MXTL01P120 hard drive and when I tried
>> to install it with Redhat it wrote over the partition table describing
>> it as only 8GB.  I tried doing linux rescue and lilo complained that
>> the physical and logical disk sizes did not match (logical was the
>> correct size, physical was the 8GB).
>> 
>> Any idea what could be causing this?
> 
> I ended up getting a good answer to this question.  Thanks to everyone
> who answered, especially Stuart Longland who gave me the right answer.
> 
> I'm not sure precisely what caused this.  It probably has something to
> do with the BIOS I suppose.  I don't know how this part of the kernel
> works.
> 
> Anyway, to fix the problem is had to give lba32 as a kernel option
> when booting the kernel.  That upped my max from 8GB to 32GB.  The
> other thing I had to do was make my new drive the master and the old
> drive the slave.  That allowed the system to see all the drive.
> 
> Is should be noted that I have a new motherboard in this system.  The
> old 20Gig drive was exibiting the same 8Gig problem without the LBA32
> switch. So it must be the BIOS that is the problem.  It's an AMI bios,
> and unfortunately the machine belongs to my SO so I can't type the
> version at the moment.

But, it's not helping me aparently.  This morning the system would no
longer boot.  I got a call from my SO while I was driving home from
work today (my commute is 240 miles round trip) so I tried to talk her
through putting grub back on the system.  Somehow the drive ended up
getting formatted, and now I'm back at square one.  Unfortunately this
time the linux lba32 boot is no longer working.  It won't recognize
either of the drives as being more than 8 gig.

I suspect this is a motherboard/bios issue, the motherboard is an
ECS 'K7S5A Pro'. (www.ecsusa.com), the bios is an AMIBIOS simple setup
utility Version 1.21.11.  The distro is redhat 9 straight off of the
CD.  There doesn't seem to be anything on it to select large LBAs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated even a "I know that mobo is no
good with linux, get another one" would be useful since we've only had
it a couple of weeks and could probably return it.  (Which I would
have done already, except that it was the only one Frys carried that
would take the brand new SDram (not DDR) we bought for the previous
motherboard which then proceeded to smoke after the next power hit.
(Yes, I've been having a very frustrating month with the SO's
computer.))

Jay

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Re: Problems with Maxtor 120 GB drive

[Jay Denebeim]

Hi it's me again,

I'm still having problems with my Maxtor drive.  Again, my
configuration is as follows: 

1) motherboard: ECS K7S5A Pro latest firmware from their website
2) distribution: Redhat 9 (Tom's rtbt does the same thing)
3) kernel: 2.4.20
4) Harddrive Maxtor 120GB MXTL01P120

Note, there's also a western digital 20gig in the system that exibits
the same problems.

Problem:
Disk druid and fdisk only own up to there being 8 gig on the drives.
There seems to be no way to force it to other values.

I've tried:

1) turning the knobs in the bios.
2) saying 'lba32' to the kernel during boot.  (I've since found out
   that this is not a switch to the kernel, it's to lilo)
3) Switching the master/slavedness of the drives.
4) Trying 1 and 2 with each drive separately.

It should be noted that before I changed out the motherboard the 20gig
drive worked fine.  We had a power hit which is what started all
this.  Since then we've replaced the CPU, memory, motherboard, and
finally one of the hard drives which has put us in this state.

New things I've discovered.

1) Windows XP has no problem with this system.
2) the information in /proc/ide/hd? is incorrect
3) hdparm -I gives the correct data

I really, really need help.  For instance, where does the data in
/proc/ide/hd? come from?  What code derives it?  Is there any way to
force good values into it?

My theory is that this data is coming from the CMOS somewhere.  I was
talking with a maxtor engineer about this and he mentioned something
about this, but when I tried to pin him down to something I could
actually investigate he couldn't help me.  That seems to mean if I get
another motherboard I could make this problem go away.  Only problem
is this is the only SDRAM motherboard Fry's carries, so I'll have to
buy new ram as well.  (since it's all brand new I'm hesitant to just
pitch this stuff, unfortunately we can't find the receipt for the mobo
so I've alreaday poured that $60 down the drain)

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas I'd greatly appreciate a hand.

Jay

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