250GB Hard drive - OK?

[Fryguy8]

Will linux (and windows), utilize a 250GB hard drive OK? notably fat32 and/or reiserfs filesystems. Will it be able to take the whole thing in 1 chunk, or will I have to split it up?

[mrBen]

OK, let's take this in pieces:

BIOS: You'll need to check that your BIOS supports LBA, and all that jazz. Even if it doesn't you should still be able to use it, but you may have to 'fiddle' with it.

Windows: FAT32 _can_ do partitions of 250GB, but you'll have to play with one of the following tools:

fdisk (Win9x/ME) - won't recognise the disk to full capacity, thus to partition properly, when you create the primary partition, do _not_ choose to 'fill the whole disk' and then when it asks for the partition size, enter 100%. Do the business, and then you should see that when you format it, it comes out OK.

Disk Management (Win2k, XP) - won't let you do it with FAT32; will default for NTFS

BUT you will need to install a patch for Win2k/XP, because it will initially be seen only as 137Gb.

For WinXP, Service Pack 1 should work. For Win2k, Service Pack 4 might work.

If either of those fail, you will need to follow the MS instructions for editing your registry to enable 48-bit LBA addressing. You can instructions at the MS site, under knowledge-base document Q305098 (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q305098).


A modern Linux distro should work fine ;)

[Fryguy8]

and reiserfs/ext3/etc will all handle partitions of that size no problem?

And in windows if I choose to split that up into 3-4 smaller partitions it won't be a problem either, right? The only thing that matters is the virtual size of each partition, not the drive as a whole.

thanks

[Satanic Atheist]

From what I have gathered...

Would I be accurate in assuming that although the BIOS does the initialisation of the system (including searching for boot devices, including the MBR on the primary hard drive), Linux has the ability to "override" the BIOS for stuff such as disk geometry? Hell, can it do it for more stuff? Does Linux boot it's own "mini-BIOS" based on settings taken from the onboard stuff?

James

[Jowls]

>>> A modern Linux distro should work fine

Well, yeah except for Debian. It refused to see my 200 GBytes Maxtor as anything but 137 G. Fedora and Mandrake can do it though.... and sourceMage.

[blobaugh]

Yes, any linux distro (except maybe the one mentioned by Jowls) should be able to see and utilize the full drive. Splitting the drive into many partitions should not do anything to its usabilty under linux. It may even make all the steps mrBen illustrated unnessecary if the partitions are small enough. I don't recommend using the microsoft fdisk if you are not familiar with it though. Try ranish (http://www.ranish.com).

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Here's some advice on doing FAT32, from Microsoft. Don't do it for partitions over 32GB. I didn't heed that warning, and I did an entire 80GB drive as one GIANT FAT32 partition. It was good up until I got about 32GB of data on it. Once I hit that point, I got MAJOR data corruption.

Thinking it was something I had done, or a random screwup, I reformatted and tried again. Once I hit about 32GB, it happened again. So, I just put the drive into 3 partitions, each of them less than 32GB. It worked great on that system from then on.

[bandwidth_pig]

Originally posted by Jowls
>>> A modern Linux distro should work fine

Well, yeah except for Debian. It refused to see my 200 GBytes Maxtor as anything but 137 G. Fedora and Mandrake can do it though.... and sourceMage.

You know, I run Debian myself. And interestingly, with a 200 gig drive. Did you run that 200 gig drive through a promise controller by any chance? I suspect that you had different options enabled in the different kernels and that was the source of your trouble. Until I loaded the promise drivers in the kernel, my box only saw 137 too. But this in fact, has nothing to do with Debian. It's a problem with the IDE controler if I remember correctly. Once I hooked my drive up to my Promise PCI controler, compiled the kernel with the drivers in it, I was good to go.

[bandwidth_pig]

Oh...and BTW...Debian does see my entire 250 gig drive too.

[Jowls]

No, I am not using a Promise controller - just the on-board IDE on my fairly new (meaning that the BIOS recognizes the 200G drive correctly) Soltek mobo. The chip could be a Promise though.... I havent checked.

I tried installing with 2.2 as well as 2.4 kernel - in both cases it reported the drive as 137G - but I didnt attempt to recompile any of them.

I guess this simply means that the standard Debian is built with a driver that doesnt support my on-board IDE controller, as opposed to Fedora and Mandrake.

Based on your experiences with Debian and 200G plus drives, I will definitely try recompiling with different drivers next time I need to install a Linux box, since Debian is my favorite distro. So thanks for the info.

regards,
J

[Ninja_Squirrel]

My question is why use fat32? Why not NTFS?

[mrBen]

Originally posted by Ninja_Squirrel
My question is why use fat32? Why not NTFS?

In my experience most people want to use FAT32 because they are dual-booting and want read/write access to the partition from both Linux and Windows. NTFS support under Linux is not (yet) of the stability that you would want for that, although I hear that under the 2.6 kernel NTFS support is now stable.