Interesting Har d Drive Troubles

[tvynr]

Alright, this is a story.

We have a 60 gigabyte hard drive in a 700 MHz Athalon on which we are attempting to install RedHat 7.3.

Originally, the motherboard for this computer was incapable of recognizing the drive as 60 Gb... it treated it as a 30 Gb drive and simply spread the data across the medium.

Since that time, the motherboard has been replaced. Recently, a write-zeroes utility was used on the drive so it could be used for its full 60 Gb capacity. The BIOS and Microsoft Windows both recognize the drive as a 60 Gb drive.

Somehow, however, the RedHat 7.3 installer still thinks that this drive is a 30 Gb drive. This makes little sense, since any record of this should have been erased by the use of the write-zeroes utility. I know this isn't a general problem with the RedHat 7.3 installer because I am writing this message from a box that contains a 120Gb hard drive and is running RedHat 7.3 (properly). We cannot, however, convince the 7.3 installer that this 60 Gb drive, which, for a time, was being used as a 30 Gb drive, is actually a 60 Gb drive.

What element of the system could be indicating the wrong size to the RedHat installer? How can we fix this one?

Help is very much appreciated. This problem is keeping a Windows user from migrating and joining the Linux community. I give sincere thanks for the time you can spare and await your responses. :)

Take care!

[mdwatts]

Your bios is what reports the HD size and parameters to the operating system.

[tvynr]

Yeah, I'd thought so. Here are the odd bits.

When the hard drive was taken off of its 30Gb settings and set to autodetect in the BIOS, it autodetected 30Gb. Once I had zeroed the hard drive, it autodetected 60Gb. At this point, Windows is appropriately receiving 60Gb from the BIOS; the RedHat Linux installer is not.

Are there different services by which the RedHat installer retrieves its information?

Thanks again for the help. :)

[mrBen]

Actually, Linux is able to scan the IDE controller itself, as can WinXP. But it is the BIOS that initialises booting the drive. I have my BIOS set not to detect my drive, and Linux picks it up fine with a boot disk.

If it's not the primary master, or if you have a boot disk, see if disabling the BIOS and using the boot disk settles it.

Also, here at IBM (harddrive support ;) ) we use a utility called DDO which is a software layer that boots from the mbr and pretends to be the BIOS to the OS. Double check that the mbr has been erased properly.

[tvynr]

Thanks, mrBen, I'll double check the MBR. Would that not be erased by Maxtor's write-zeroes utility, tho? I'd think it would...

The drive is supposed to act as the primary master drive. Would it still be possible to convince Linux to recognize it from the IDE controller itself as you stated?

I attempted to reach the hard drive from the Linux installation CD, but it was an old copy of RedHat 6.2 and the /dev directory didn't contain any hard drives. If I could get to a Linux prompt like that, and my Linux knowledge is up to the task, would a line like

/dev/zero > dd bs=1000 count=60000000 > /dev/hda

zero the hard drive as well?

Thanks again!