[SGVLUG] Interesting Problem (1tb drive showing up as 80GB)

[Claude Felizardo]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 7:20 AM, Charles Wyble <charles at thewybles.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> So the subject pretty much says it all. :)
>
> I recently purchased 2 Seagate SATA 1 TB drives and upon installing them in
> my system (Acer Aspire desktop - AMD64 4 gigs of ram ~2 years old) they show
> up (both in the bios and to Ubuntu (not that the OS would see them as
> different sizes at least not on modern drives if I understand correctly)) as
> 80GB. I replaced 2 500GB drives in the system which worked fine without
> needing any special jumper settings etc.
>
> Google doesn't produce any useful results with various search terms. To many
> product sites...... *mumbles about the semantic web promise and kicks brain
> dead search engine *
>
> Any ideas? Do I need to upgrade my bios to support 1TB drives?
>
> --
> Charles Wyble (818) 280 - 7059
> http://charlesnw.blogspot.com
> CTO Known Element Enterprises / SoCal WiFI project


Older BIOS's had problems recognizing larger drives so some
manufacturers had a jumper on the drive that would have it report a
different geometry as a workaround.  I definitely remember having to
deal with this years ago but that was with EIDE drives.  Back in my
TiVo hacking days, you sometimes had to run a utility from the
manufacturer to set it permanently otherwise it would reset after
cycling power.  Earlier this year I put a set of 500 GB SATA drives in
my fileserver but don't recall if i had to move any jumpers.

For a little more info on the jumper, have a look here:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html

There should be a little jumper diagram on the drive or you can check
with the manufacturer.  Oh, looks like the following google search
yields some info: "seagate clip jumper".  Looks like there might be a
jumper for enabling SATA2 as well.

claude