BIOS won't recognize all of hard drive

[kornp]

I have a 40 gig hard drive in an oldish computer (K6-2 450) that has an ASUS P5A-B motherboard, and it doesn't seem to recognize the hard drives full 40 gigs. There is a jumper setting on the hard drive (can't remember what it's called) that makes the bios think it's 32 gigs and all works fine, except that I now only have 32 gigs of HD space to play with. Is there a way to get this thing to recognize all 40 gigs? I checked for a BIOS update but there didn't seem to be any available.

[Blaqb0x]

When you load a boot cd, does what ever OS you are installing see 32gigs or 40?

[trickster]

http://www.lugod.org/mailinglists/archives/vox-tech/2002-08/msg00244.html


http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html


Not exactly a solution, but might help.

[CP]

So you're saying the jumper is set to limit the drive to 32GB? What capacity does it recognise it as when the jumper isn't set?
And here is a bios flash for you
http://www.bios-drivers.com/drivers/30/30494.htm

[korn]

what OS is installed on the drive? I bought a 80 GB hard drive and my PII 450 only sees 14 GB. I just saved the settings and booted into linux. Ran fdisk and it saw 73 GB. I created the partition ran mkfs.ext2 -j and off I went.

[kornp]

It's running Gentoo Linux, fdisk can see the whole disk, but can't make any partitions above the 32 gig mark. I still haven't gotten around to updating the bios, but hopefully soon I will have time. Thanks for the help so far guys.

[korn]

Have you tried setting the jumpers to the regular master/slave configuration and just accepting whatever the bios sees. Then running fdisk to see if it will recognize the full forty?

[kornp]

Rex: If I put the drive as regular master/slave the machine would lock up on boot.

I have now updated the bios to the beta version from asus and all is working perfectly, the bios sees all 40 gigs. Now I just need to use parted to extend my root partition and all is well. Thanks for all the help guys!

[kornp]

Okay, now I'm attempting to resize the partition and not having much luck. Partition Magic apparently handles ext3 (which this partition is) but it doesn't seem to want to do anything of the sort for me. Parted doesn't like the arrangement of the partition. So, I have come across ext2resize, a program the will resize an ext2/3 filesystem, but it doesn't change the partition size. So now I need to expand the actual partition, not caring if the filesystem get's expanded, so that I can come back with ext2resize afterwards and expand the filesystem.

According the this documentation I can delete the partition with fdisk, and make a new one with the same starting block but a larger size, and then resize the FS later with ext2resize. This sounds a little crazy to me personally, can anyone verify that this won't kill all of my data??? I want to attempt it, but losing all of my stuff doesn't exactly sound like fun to me.

If this isn't going to work, does anyone have any other suggestions on how I can accomplish this task?

[trickster]

Do you have any other hard drive that cna store the data while you destroy and create new partitions?

I personally use Symantec Ghost (Because I ran into the problem with Partition Magic not wanting to resize because of the position of the sectors.)
Basically, create an image of your hard drive, either to another drive or to cd-rw, and then install the image again. It will allow you to resize the partitions ANY way you want it.

Ghost Trial (for Windows :-\.)