Very Computer

by **Alessandro Staltar** » Tue, 11 Aug 1998 04:00:00

I experienced this problem installing Linux on a old 486dx2 50 system with
no BIOS support for big HD.
I heard Linux have no problem with big disks but it isn't for DOS, so I
split the disk into 2 partitions, the 1st for DOS, the 2nd for Linux.
Linux's fdisk seem to see the disk correctly, showing me the right sizes for
both partitions about 425MB for each, but when I try to make an ext2 file
system on the second partition its size is about 200MB, the half of how much
I expected.
Is there somebody can give me any suggestion about this problem?

Thanks,

Alessandro Staltari

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/8155

by **Pat Thoyt** » Wed, 12 Aug 1998 04:00:00

> I experienced this problem installing Linux on a old 486dx2 50 system with
> no BIOS support for big HD.
> I heard Linux have no problem with big disks but it isn't for DOS, so I
> split the disk into 2 partitions, the 1st for DOS, the 2nd for Linux.
> Linux's fdisk seem to see the disk correctly, showing me the right sizes for
> both partitions about 425MB for each, but when I try to make an ext2 file
> system on the second partition its size is about 200MB, the half of how much
> I expected.
> Is there somebody can give me any suggestion about this problem?

Yup.

This happened to me. What has happened is that you have changed the
geometry of your harddisk in the BIOS. When you originally partitioned
the disk for DOS it wrote in the geometry into the boot sector and the
partition sector of the disk. You've now changed it -- perhaps by
setting the LBA option on or something -- and various programs are
reading the geometry from the wrong places.

Personally I fixed this by making a backup and writing zeros over the
first part of the disk with
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=10

This way no fdisk program can mess it up.

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Very Computer

mkfs uses half of the partition on a old 486 with a 850MB big disk

mkfs uses half of the partition on a old 486 with a 850MB big disk

mkfs uses half of the partition on a old 486 with a 850MB big disk