[vox-tech] Demo machine motherboard doesn't like > 64 Gig drives

[Peter Jay Salzman]

2 days ago i put an 80GB drive into satan.  when bios started looking
for drives, it always hung when it tried to autodetect this drive.

i tried everything i possibly could to get the machine to boot with this
drive installed.  nothing i did worked.

i put the drive in lucifer (much newer machine).  it detected the new
hard drive just fine and booted up with no problems.

i partitioned the drive and made the filesystem on lucifer, then put the
drive back into satan.  this time around satan's bios was able to detect
the drive just fine and it booted up flawlessly.

pete


begin msimons@moria.simons-clan.com <msimons@moria.simons-clan.com> 
>   There is another interesting bug in the BIOS on the demo machine
> motherboard BIOS.  It appears to lock solid if you attempt to 
> configure a drive over 64Gig in size.  I think the problem 
> is when it goes to calculate the size for display purposes
> the BIOS program crashes.  If you auto-detect a large drive 
> it attempts to display the values it found on a second screen,
> but the application locks solid.  When you manually enter drive 
> fields it calculates the size from the geometry as you enter it, 
> as soon as it gets too big the program locks up.
> 
>   Fortunately you can set the drive to "auto" and at boot time
> the drive is detected, but this chunk of the BIOS program doesn't
> lock up so the machine can continue to boot.
> 
>   Interestingly if you don't allow the BIOS to detect the drive
> at all, the motherboard will refuse to do and kind of DMA transfers
> with the drive... so "hdparm -d 1" results in a few bus resets.
> 
>     TTFN,
>       Mike