Problems Having the Harddrive See The full size

[jacksonon]

Hi, ive been trying to run fdisk on knoppix, ive tried 2 hard drives, both is saying it has 130 clyinders when they clearly have more... when i try to change it its unable to write... any ideas? thank you in advance.

[Harry Kuhman]

Please see answer #7.

[jacksonon]

updated to apply to your guidelines...

[Harry Kuhman]

Thank you.

You may want to post more details about the drives themselves and the exact specs that fdisk is reporting. I'm not sure what is happening from what you have posted, but it might not even be a problem. Because of some unfortunate design choices that Microsoft made in their disk support long ago (and never fixed), many drives have far more cylinders than Microsoft can actually support. The approach that drive makers have come up with to deal with this is simply to have the drive lie about the disk geometry. You may find a drive that claims it has far more heads than it actually has, but far fewer cylinders than it really has. The drive knows enough to take the addressing it receives from the OS and translate it to real head/track/sector information (if it uses head/track/sector at all, rather than use LBA). So if the information that you are getting from the drive works out to about the drive size (and remember that drive makers lie through their teeth about the actual size of the drive), then you likely can just ignore the reported cylinder count. Still, 130 seems extremely low, but without the full context I just can't tell.

[jacksonon]

The reason i was saying the clyinders is because it was only seeing half the drive (5GB)


It sees the exact same thing for both hardrives

Note: sector size is 2048 (not 512)

Disk /dev/hda: 4324 MB, 4324229120 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 131 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 2048 = 32901120 bytes