In message <[email protected]>, John-Mark Gurney <[email protected]> wrote:
>Ronald F. Guilmette wrote this message on Fri, May 16, 2014 at 12:38 -0700: >> >> In message <[email protected]>, >> John-Mark Gurney <[email protected]> wrote: >> >Wow, I just noticed this... FreeBSD is only seeing it as a 31MB drive >> >instead of a 1TB drive... This is probably the problem... >> >> OHHHHH! Wow! Yea. That is MESSED UP! >> ... >Can you get a memstick of 11-CURRENT from: >https://www.freebsd.org/snapshots/ >and get the output of: >camcontrol identify ada2 -v >from a boot of the memstick? mav thinks that it might be an issue w/ >HPA, and this should help track it down. I don't think that there is any need anymore for me to do the above steps. I am now convinced that I do know what has caused this rather remarkable (and remarkably annoying) problem. I had forgotten all about this, until now, but there is apparently a known problem where older (pre-2010) Gigabyte motherboards will in fact create a Host Protected Area (HPA) on the ``first'' ATA drive in a given system, *and* that in cases where the drive is 1TB or larger, the result will be a drive that self-identifies as being only 31 (or 32) megabytes big. (You can google for this known problem and you'll find a _lot_ of references to it.) The specific 1 TB drive on which I experienced this problem had been working just fine with no problems whatsoever on another system that I have here. However I made the mistake of trying to put it into my #2 desktop system, which is based on a vintage 2006 Gigabyte motherboard. I now firmly believe that this caused the specific form of corruption that now afflicts the drive in question. I already have sought, and have already been provided with the steps that I need to undertake in order to "repair" the apparent capacity of the drive in question, and I am already making plans to replace my *&^%$#@ Gigabyte motherboard with something different with all due haste. I will *never* purchase another Gigabyte motherboard as long as I live! (In addition to this extraordinarily problem, it also has had a number of obscure problems booting various things from USB-attached mass storage.) Anyway, my thanks to all involved for their time and effort considering my unfortunate plight. Who knew that just connecting an otherwise flawless hard drive to a specific kind of motherboard would instantly render it effectively brain dead? Regards, rfg _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-geom To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
