trouble accessing a hard drive

Adam Myrow myrowa at bellsouth.net
Sat Mar 21 20:02:47 EDT 2009


On Sat, 21 Mar 2009, Alex Snow wrote:

> on any 2.6.x system it appears that there is one partition acording to
> fdisk (type 55/EZ-Drive).  Anyone have any idea why this is happening?

Basically, EZ-Drive was one of several products known as dynamic disk 
overlays.  They would allow a machine whose CMOS couldn't handle drives 
over, say, 8GB, or 32GB to still function.  I ran into this when I put a 
40GB drive into an old machine that refused to recognize anything larger 
than 8GB.  The drive overlay gets loaded into memory, and basically forces 
the drive to work despite the CMOS.  Because almost nobody has old 
computers requiring drive overlays, the Linux kernel dropped automatic 
detection of them in the 2.6 series.  Basically, what Linux is doing in 
the 2.4 kernels is noticing the disk overlay, then skipping over it to 
find the real partition table.  A quick Google search reveals that the 
syntax of the boot flag is "hda=remap."  Obviously, you substitute the 
correct drive here.  This will force a 2.6 kernel to skip over the 
EZ-Drive partition.  I don't know if this works with the newer LibATA 
drivers, but I doubt it.  Since Slackware doesn't use them for IDE drives, 
this shouldn't present a problem.  Anyway, good luck.



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