On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 13:08, et wrote: > On Sunday 18 August 2002 07:26 pm, you wrote: <snip> > > After my sh*tty IBM Deskstar drive dying on me last week, I'm wondering > > whether it was thru my own doing so can someone please help me > > determine what the correct parameter for my hard drives are. I have > > two hard drives: 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV and 6.4GB Quantum Bigfoot. > > > > I'm using Mandrake Cooker and lilo-22.3.2-5 gives the following warning > > (I've been getting warnings about differing geometries with the last 3 > > or 4 versions of lilo, including on the now-dead IBM Deskstar) : <snip> > > Sharrea > > now was one of these drives (my guess the seagate) in a computer that had > a bios that could not see a drive as big as this? maybe when brand new? > and has since gotten ether an new motherboard or a BIOS upgrade? and was > setup with the manufacturers setup disk? maybe backup first, then a > fooling around with diskdrake from the install CD is in your future..... > maybe a newdrive is also in your future, but not as likely unless you > feel like spending the cash.
Sounds like you're onto something there! The drive that is now a paper-weight (I'm going to take it apart to see whats inside to satisfy my curiosity) is the 60GB IBM Deskstar which only lasted 18 months! Yes, it came with the IBM Drive Manager installed on it which I originally used when installing Windoze 98SE. IIRC, I later formatted the drive and removed the Drive Manager only to find that the BIOS did not recognise the full capacity. I did a BIOS flash upgrade but it still didn't recognise full capacity so I installed the Ontrack Dynamic Drive Overlay to be able to utilise the full 60GB. Next came the PC upgrade (new case, mobo, cpu, ram, etc) and I transferred the drive to that PC. Then last year when I first started using linux, Civileme said that I should remove the DDO and use the hd geometries from hdparm. I messed around with that trying every possible thing I could think of but Mandrake could only see the 30GB (same in the BIOS) so I had no choice BUT to use the DDO. I tried all that again about a month ago but it was a waste of time. Then we had a wicked power outage a few weeks ago which fried part of the drive - it affected one of the RedHat (dual booting with Mandrake) partitions. I continued to use the drive knowing it was only a matter of time before it was completely stuffed - it was making loud screeching noises whenever that part of the drive was accessed. And finally I decided to use the Seagate drive in my main PC so switched drives, removed all partitions, created new partitions and formatted (on both drives). The IBM drive didn't complete the formatting process (not that I expected it to) so I turned the computer off. When I turned it back on: nada, nothing but screech... screech... Never did like that stupid drive anyway, especially having to use the DDO and it was noisy. And would you believe I paid NZ$1109 (approx US$550) for it 18 months ago! So I'm just a bit worried about lilo's warnings of differing geometries and wondering why BIOS, hdparm and fdisk all use different geometries on the Seagate and Quantum. Jeez this has turned into long rant. Thanks for your input. Cheers Sharrea -- The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better" so I installed Linux.
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