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

[Charles Wyble]

Claude Felizardo wrote:
> 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?
>>
>>     
>
> 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
>   

Ok. I'll look into this stuff.... I just didn't expect to have to do 
this on a pretty modern system.



-- 
Charles Wyble (818) 280 - 7059
http://charlesnw.blogspot.com
CTO Known Element Enterprises / SoCal WiFI project