[ILUG] Weird IDE drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Stephane Dudzinski (stephane at cp.dias.ie):

> Linux Debian woody installer sees 8GB on it but not more.

Which boot flavour?  

When you're at the second installer screen and push F3, you see the
names of all available boot flavours on the CD.  The default is a 2.2.x
kernel, but you should usually prefer the "bf2.4" flavour, which starts
you out with a 2.4 kernel (currently 2.4.18 + backported security fixes
on the Official Debian 3.0r2 installer, if memory serves).

> Is there anything i missed ? I need to boot up a debian SMP kernel but
> didn't find a CD around with that feature.

No, you don't.  

It's a common mistake to think that you're intended to retain the
installation kernel.  You aren't:  You're intended to browse the
available "kernel-image-*" packages to find one appropriate to your
architecture, e.g., kernel-image-2.4.23-1-686-smp".

> I'm onto the reseller of the server to see if a bios update is available
> as well. I also noticed that the lilo parameter : hd=cyl,sect,head (as
> documented on F3) does not work.

As someone else said, could be a jumpering problem.  The LDP's Large
Disk HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO.html) clarifies
how any Linux kernel assesses disk geometry, during boot-up.  The
"hda=cyls,heads,secs" (note that you got the order and device name wrong!) 
trick overrides the kernel's internal algorithm for figuring out those
things, and should always work great if you specify the right numbers
and names -- barring hardware problems.

-- 
Cheers,                           "This is Unix.  Stop acting so helpless."
Rick Moen                                               -- D.J. Bernstein
rick at linuxmafia.com