[rescue] Axil 311 (SS10) hard drive compatibility

Mouse mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
Fri Oct 7 18:48:30 CDT 2011


> 1. Will a machine that old be able to boot off of such a large disk ?
> I don't remember the precise problems with openboot.

Based on text I cut, this seems to be talking about SCSI.  The only
issue I know of with SCSI disk size is the 6-byte-CDB vs 10-byte-CDB
issue, and that has nothing to do with drive size and everything to do
with where on the drive things are.  Basically, it means your boot
partition needs to be within the first GB of the disk (21 bits of
sector number, times half-K sectors).  Even that depends on the details
of the ROM code; in my experience it correlates better with machine
type than anything else, but that could be coincidence of one sort or
another - and it doesn't seem to make chronological sense, as in,
anything with a release date past some point is fixed and anything
before has the bug.

But I haven't really paid close attention, so that could very well be a
spurious impression.  I tend to set my disks up that way even on
machines that don't need it, so the disk's bootable even on a machine
with the limit.

And, strictly, your boot partition can go beyond 1G, as long as all the
sectors needed to boot are before that, but with most filesystems
that's difficult to arrange except by keeping the whole boot partition
below the limit.

					Mouse


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