# 160gb hard drive?

## geordie

Hi,

Anyone know if a 160gb HD will be OK in Linux? I think the 137gb fix was back in 2.4.16 but I'm not sure.

Thanks in advance

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## spb

Should be fine, unless you have a retarded BIOS or something...

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## lbrtuk

Even if you have a retarded bios it should be fine. When it comes to ide, linux pretty much completely ignores the bios.

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## spb

Yes, but booting can occasionally cause problems. But yes, go ahead and use it. It should work perfectly.

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## borkdox

I have one, it works perfectly.

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## neysx

No roblem at all even if your BIOS does not recognize the full 160Gb or more.

Just make sure you have a smal boot partition at the beginning if you boot from it.

```
# dmesg|grep hdh

   ide3: BM-DMA at 0xb808-0xb80f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:DMA

hdh: SAMSUNG SV1604N, ATA DISK drive

hdh: max request size: 1024KiB

hdh: 312581808 sectors (160041 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=19457/255/63, UDMA(100)

# vgs --units G

VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize   VFree 

lvm    1   1   0 wz-- 160.03G 95.60G
```

Edit: forgot to mention my old BIOS sees only ~137Gb, Linux knows better  :Wink: 

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## geordie

Thanks everyone - much appreciated

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## holmis

 *lbrtuk wrote:*   

> Even if you have a retarded bios it should be fine. When it comes to ide, linux pretty much completely ignores the bios.

 

Really?  :Shocked: 

But I've got a retarded BIOS which won't accept disks larger than 34Gb or something like that, and I haven't been able to boot even a 40Gb disk.   :Question: 

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## lbrtuk

 *holmis wrote:*   

>  *lbrtuk wrote:*   Even if you have a retarded bios it should be fine. When it comes to ide, linux pretty much completely ignores the bios. 
> 
> Really? 
> 
> But I've got a retarded BIOS which won't accept disks larger than 34Gb or something like that, and I haven't been able to boot even a 40Gb disk.  

 

Yeah, but that's booting. Did you try creating a smaller boot partition at the beginning of the drive?

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## archsvile

HOLY SHIT 160 gb is fuckn big i only have 5 gb used and i have millions of games u prob only need 40gb at the most for linux

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## holmis

 *lbrtuk wrote:*   

> Yeah, but that's booting. Did you try creating a smaller boot partition at the beginning of the drive?

 

Well, problem is that my comp won't even recognise the disk when its larger than 30Gb -- it doesn't go as far as to boot anything. It just hangs after the memory test when probing (?) the IDE devices, CDs etc.

Old crap...

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## holmis

 *teddien wrote:*   

> HOLY SHIT 160 gb is fuckn big i only have 5 gb used and i have millions of games u prob only need 40gb at the most for linux

 

Then comes the movies and then 160Gb isn't that fuckn big anymore...   :Very Happy: 

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## sklettke

I have a 200GB Seagate and a 160GB Hitachi that I combined to make a 360GB LVM partition (I used XFS) for my mythtv box. I need the space for my dvds and to be able to record TV shows in their entirety. I'm using the 7nif2 chaintech nforce2 motherboard and it works perfectly.

Scott

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## Rainmaker

sorry for going a bit offtopic, but how's the performance when combining 2 psyschical different disks with LVM? Is there any noticible performance degrade?

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## pixie

When I was using a 60GB drive on a <32GB biosed box I found a really old 512MB drive that used to live in my Amiga 1200 to use as a /boot partition. Then I just told bios to ignore the primary slave and all was well.

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## superjaded

 *Rainmaker wrote:*   

> sorry for going a bit offtopic, but how's the performance when combining 2 psyschical different disks with LVM? Is there any noticible performance degrade?

 

I haven't noticed any, personally.

There's a bit of a delay when you initially mount large logical volumes (I have a /dev/vg/media at 163gb for example that takes upwards of maybe 8 seconds to mount), but reading and writing aren't noticebly slower than a single physical volume.

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## sklettke

 *Rainmaker wrote:*   

> sorry for going a bit offtopic, but how's the performance when combining 2 psyschical different disks with LVM? Is there any noticible performance degrade?

 

I just installed it yesterday so I haven't had time to play around with it too much yet, but both hard drives are 7200rpm with an 8MB cache so it should be pretty transparent.

BTW, here's what I did to combine them:

```
pvcreate /dev/hdc1 (the second hard drive)

vgextend storage /dev/hdc1

vgdisplay (remember the number of extents of the new volume)

vgextend storage /dev/hdc1

lvextend -l+(# of extents from above) /dev/storage/video

xfs_growfs -d -l /dev/storage/video (no need to unmount)

```

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## tecknojunky

 *neysx wrote:*   

> No problem at all even if your BIOS does not recognize the full 160Gb or more.
> 
> Just make sure you have a smal boot partition at the beginning if you boot from it.
> 
> ```
> ...

 My mobo does not see past the 137GB threashold.  Whenever I boot, when Gentoo gets to the file system checking part, the system simply reboots stone cold.  Very hard to diagnose.

Then it worked.  I was able to partition the drive.  When I tried to mount another drive, the system, again, rebooted cold.

I'm very suspicious of my motherboard in this case.  I'm still searching, but if there are things I could do, i'd appreciate the help.  I'm still in the early stages of diagnosing this problem.

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## Bob P

 *spb wrote:*   

> Should be fine, unless you have a retarded BIOS or something...

 

i've got exactly that problem!    :Wink: 

i've just tried to put some of those new WD JB1200 (120 GB) disks into an old Pentium-class PC that I plan to use as a network backup server.  Everything went fine during the Gentoo install until it came time to reboot from the new drive.  Instead of a quick bootup, the BIOS is confused and takes forever to recognize the HD.  It eventually reports the disk by name and model number, but Grub issues an error 16.

The problems is that the drive is larger than the BIOS can handle, even though the BIOS does LBA.  Its one of those Pentium-class PCs that was built in the era when a 37 GB drive was hard to imagine.  

To solve the problem, I tried partitioning the drive into a smaller boot sector that the BIOS could handle:

```

Partition File System    ID  Size      Description 

/dev/hda1 ReiserFS 3.6   83  100 MB    Boot partition 

/dev/hda2 (swap)         82  512 MB    Swap partition 

/dev/hda3 ReiserFS 3.6   83  Remainder Root Partition 
```

unfortunately, even though my boot partition is only 100 MB, the device won't boot properly.  Sometimes I'm locked up, and sometimes Grub eventually boots to my default selection via a totally blank screen.  if boot works,it takes what feels like 10 minutes to happen.

any ideas?  i'd prefer to avoid the kludge method of putting a 350 MB drive in there as the boot drive, and then shutting it off after the kernel boots.

thx.

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## NeddySeagoon

For all users with large hdds that won't boot.

Set the jumper on the drive to clip, so it tells the BIOS what it want to hear, that gets you booted.

Now tell the kernel to unclip the drive. How you do that varies from kernel to kernel. For some you add 

```
hdX=stroke
```

 to the kernel command line in grub.conf. For others its a kernel config option.

All the gory details and the history are in the Large HDD HOWTO on the Linux Documenantion Project.

You may find BIOS updates to fix it too.

=============== edit ====================

You need your /boot files to be in the part of teh drive the BIOS can see, or you won't get booted. Hence the historical small /boot at the front of the drive.

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## Bob P

 *NeddySeagoon wrote:*   

> For all users with large hdds that won't boot.
> 
> Set the jumper on the drive to clip, so it tells the BIOS what it want to hear, that gets you booted.

 

Thanks for your quick response and for your helpful post.  I had never heard about "clip" settings on the drives, so I learned something new today.

If anyone needs that HowTo, here is the PDF.

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## Bob P

another tidbit:  on the WD1200 JB drive I'm using, the HOWTO isn't very clear.  There is a page on the WD site that is helpful, though:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=*rEpEYuh&p_lva=84&p_li=&p_faqid=83&p_created=1005001469

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