I'm using Mandrake 10.0 Community, with the 2.6 kernel. I've just installed a 160GB Maxtor DiamondPlus IDE drive (currently as 'hdb'), but Mandrake can only see 128GB of it. XP Pro on the same machine can see all 160GB fine.
Googling suggests that the usual solutions appear to be:
1) Upgrade the BIOS 2) Install a new drive controller card
My BIOS appears to be up-to-date AFAICT, and correctly reports the drive size.
It's an Asus A7A266 motherboard, BIOS version 1012. The Asus site didn't show any later versions (though the site was so difficult to navigate, I might have missed it...).
Since both the BIOS and XP can see the whole drive, wouldn't that indicate that the drive controller is OK ?
From what I've read, the 2.6 kernel is supposed to handle drives over 160GB, whereas the 2.4 kernel doesn't. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.
I tried installing several different distros on the drive (erasing it completely each time), just to try them and the drive out. They were Lycoris, Turbo Linux, MEPIS, and Fedora Core 1 (all using the 2.4 kernel AFAIK). Turbo, MEPIS and Fedora all fell over and spat the dummy when trying to partition and format the drive. Lycoris succeeded, but still couldn't see the whole drive. I haven't had a chance to try installing a fresh copy of Mandrake 10 yet (well, I tried, but it insisted on installing on the blank 10GB on my original drive, despite me telling it not to...).
Can anyone offer any pointers as to how I can resolve this ?
Many thanks, David
-- "Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket ?"
