IBM 4.1gb drive, I can only format half of it!

[Laszlo Vecsey]

Hi,

sfdisk reports 64 heads, 32 sectors, and 4134 cylnders on /dev/sda. Its an
IBM model DCAS-34330 68pin scsi drive, and the controller is an Adaptec
7880 integrated on the motherboard (intel r440lx)

I've tried various Linux kernels, from 2.0.33 stable to 2.1.89 in an
unbelievably stripped down state. No networking or even mouse support,
essentially just the aic7xxx scsi driver and ext2 fs :) No tagged queuing,
SCB paging, etc. Just a bare minimum kernel.

At boot I see the following displayed:

SCSI device sda: hdwr sector=512 bytes. Sectors= 8467200 [4134MB] [4.1 GB]

So far so good. I arrive at the (limited) shell, and run 'mke2fs /dev/sda'
It chugs along, attempting to complete 517 blocks. After completing 255 it
starts emitting the following:

Warning: could not write 8 blocks in inode table at <..number..>: No such
file or directory

Now, if I partition it, say sda1 with 2048 cylnders, I can format it
cleanly. I can even create an sda2 with another 2048, and it'll be ok. Its
when I go over that many cylnders that mke2fs starts spazzing out.

Initially I had the Adaptec BIOS enabled with extended DOS > 1024gig
translation enabled, but at the moment I have both disabled, as I
understand it the aic7xxx driver doesnt need it. I couldnt find any
difference either way, only time it got worse was when I forced
aic7xxx=extended at the LILO prompt. I'm not using that now. 

The tools were compiled with gcc 2.8.0, glibc 2.0.6, in shared elf format.
ext2fs 1.10, sfdisk 3.05.

Am I going to have to partition the thing and software raid0 it to get one
large partition, along with the wasted space from not being able to
partition it exactly in half, but rather each one slightly less.. or is
their a cleaner, hopefully obvious solution that I've missed? 

- lv


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