Re: Big drives

[John Whitley <whitley@cse.Buffalo.EDU>]

Phillip R. Jaenke writes:
 > Dan Green wrote:
 > >         We have a 37 gig drive in an Apple [... deletia ...]
 >
 > i'm more inclined to believe this is an error with ide before the
 > kernel.

The problem is a non-ppc-specific kernel problem, caused by the
failure to properly handle "ide growing pains."  8-) See the
Large Disk HOWTO at:

   http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html

The note on the Linux 65536 cylinder limit (aka the 33.8 GB limit)
gives a specific explanation as to the nature of the problem:

   http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-12.html#ss12.1

The above does indicate that the relevant patches were folded into
the linux kernel as of 2.3.21.

FWIW, I'm running a 2.2.13 SMP linux box with an IBM 34 GB drive by
virtue of Andre Hedrick's IDE patches, available in incarnations for
various stock kernel versions at:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedrick/

NOTE: I have no idea whether any of these patches will apply to any
given version of a PPC linux kernel, much less work, nor do I know of
anyone who has tried.

That said..  good luck!  8-)

-- John