Very Computer

I bought a IBM DTTA-351680 16 Gb IDE hard drive which I planned to use as my
second drive in a Sun Ultra 10 running Solaris 2.6 all recommended patches
applied.  I have encountered problems.

When I enter the format menu the systems reads the firmware label but list
the size as 7.87Gb instead of the 16GB I expected.  .

Any ideas how I can get the whole capacity?  Has anyone else put a IDE disk
in an Ultra 10 > 9Gb?

Thanks in advance.
Milo Halmo

you can't. so sorry. buy scsi, or get two IDE disks instead of one.

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Quote:> I bought a IBM DTTA-351680 16 Gb IDE hard drive which I planned to use as
my
> second drive in a Sun Ultra 10 running Solaris 2.6 all recommended patches
> applied.  I have encountered problems.

> When I enter the format menu the systems reads the firmware label but list
> the size as 7.87Gb instead of the 16GB I expected.  .

> Any ideas how I can get the whole capacity?  Has anyone else put a IDE
disk
> in an Ultra 10 > 9Gb?

So far, the Sun IDE drivers don't understand drives larger than 8GB.

                        Yousuf Khan

Quote:> In comp.unix.solaris you write:
> >So far, the Sun IDE drivers don't understand drives larger than 8GB.

> That's not true at all for SPARC platforms (and the Ultra 10 certainly
> qualifies as a SPARC platform).  SunOS 5.7 and later support >8GB EIDE
> disks on the Sun Ultra 5 and 10.

Then why don't they support it on Solaris/x86 7? I thought they were
supposed to be the same code base between the two OSes?

                Yousuf Khan

I had the same problem with a IBM DTTA 10Gb Drive.
I solved it by fdisk-ing under linux, creating a single big
partition of type solaris (swap for linux).
Then I could divide it using solaris format into different
slices. Works now for weeks without problem.

Sun should enhance this, please.

Clearly Solaris 2.7 x86 has problems with >8GB drives, but (contrary
to popular opinion) I don't think those problems have anything to do
with its ata device driver. As far as I know there aren't any >8GB bugs
anywhere in the SPARC 2.7 kernel or the x86 2.7 kernel or their respective
ata device drivers. I think the reason >8GB drives are so problematic only
on x86 platforms (and not on SPARC platforms) is that all the bugs lie
in the parts of Solaris which are *required* to be x86-platform-specific.
As far as I know the SPARC and x86 ata drivers are bus-specific but
not platform-specific (SPARC systems don't require support for the ISA
and PNP-ISA bus bindings).

Therefore whether or how much driver code is shared between the x86 and
SPARC platforms is completely irrelevant.

The only Solaris 2.7 x86 >8GB bugs I'm aware of are in:

    the Solaris Install program (which is completely confused about how
    to compute disk drive geometry, capacity, and partition alignment),

    the Solaris fdisk program (which only knows how to deal with fdisk
    partition table entries that use CHS addressing),

    and the x86 boot subsystem and all its real-mode (BEF) drivers (which
    use INT-13 style CHS addressing everywhere and therefore can't access
    any disk sector above 8GB).

Are you at all aware that various people have recently pointed out
that if you don't let the Solaris Install program create and divvy up
your Solaris x86 partition, *and* never use the Solaris fdisk utility on
*any* >8GB disk, *and* keep both the boot and root slices below the 8GB
boundary, that Solaris x86 works just fine? (Refer to deja.com or the
solaris-x86 list on egroup.com for details).

Some people have also reported success using a small (<8GB) as the install
and boot drive and later adding a second large (>8GB) drive just for user
data (e.g., /export/home) using fmthard (rather than format/fdisk).