Bad Hard Drive

[Andrej Marjan]

On January 5, 2005 04:35 pm, Henry Spencer wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Andrej Marjan wrote:
> > 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?
>
> It used to be common for hard drives to have jumper options telling them
> to lie about their capacity, precisely to handle such situations.  Meant
> that you couldn't use the extra, but at least the drive would work.  Don't
> know how common this is now -- haven't checked lately.  (Hmm, a Maxtor 40
> that I bought about a year ago has a "cap limit" jumper, and a Seagate 80
> bought a few days ago has a "limit to 32GB" jumper, so I think this
> capability is still current.  Best buy a replacement soon, though.)

I didn't realize this. It never occurred to me to even look for such a thing.
Thanks very much, it's just what I need.

I have an extra Seagate 80 with the same jumper, but an easily accessible 
Maxtor 80 here does not.

Lennart's talk of soft clipping led me to some discussions of a "stroke" 
parameter that Linux supports on boot. Apparently passing "hdX=stroke" will 
allow Linux to see the full capacity of a jumpered drive. I'll give it a try 
when I have a moment to rebuild my firewall, and I'll let everyone know.

Thanks for all replies!
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