On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 14:00, you wrote: > Hi, > 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
I had a similar problem with installing windows 98 on a machine. The bios correctly identified the hard drive and reported its correct size. but fdisk on the windows 98 boot floppy could only see part of it. I assumed that if the bios could see it then fdisk could see it as well. I was advised to update the bios, did so and all was well. My experience was similar, that bios updates were hard to track down, so I recommend that you persevere. Cheers Ross Drummond PS. A bios update changes all your custom bios settings back to the defaults. Benefit from my painful experience and note any custom bios settings before the upgrade.
