Bad Hard Drive

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 04:17:21PM -0500, Andrej Marjan wrote:
> I've lost a number of fireballs personally. None of mine (in various 
> computers, in various physical environments) has lasted over 5 years. My 
> last one (in my firewall) is also the newest, and it's also making scary 
> noises. I give it 6 months, tops. :)
> 
> That reminds me, the firewall in question can only take up to 37GB hard 
> drives, but nobody seems to carry them anymore. Is there anywhere I 
> could get a replacement drive for the (abovementioned, soon to fail) 
> drive? Or am I looking at getting an add-in PCI ATA controller that 
> supports 40GB+ hard drives?

Well if you do get an add in card, you might as well get an SiL3112 card
and buy SATA drives.  Why buy stuff that is basically becoming obsolete.
I have seen 2 port SiL3112 cards for $39 and dual channel promise ide
card for about $59 (4 drives).  Personally I think I am done buying PATA
drives.

> The latter option isn't thrilling, since these ATA controllers all seem 
> to be made by Promise, cost $30+, and boldly proclaim support of 
> dubious, proprietary software RAID schemes.

The bios on some systems have a problem with drives over 32G or so, but
most drives have a 'stroke' or 'clip' mode that you can activate to make
it lie to the bios about it's size, while linux can then get the real
size after boot allowing you to use the drive.

Look up softclip or stroke and you should find utilities from a few
companies to do it.  There is also source for a small utility for linux
to do it.  Of course you have to put the drive in a machine that
supports it first to clip it, then put it in the target and if your
kernel is a recent 2.4 or 2.6 kernel it should detect the full drive
size anyhow and allow you to partition it.

This won't let you go past 137G as far as I know since that is a 28bit
LBA limit rather than a bios stupidity.

Lennart Sorensen
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