> > Since I put this out there, I felt it was important to follow-up on so > > others could benefit from my experiences. After extensive testing, the > > cause of the problems I've experienced are a result of a bug in the > > Fasttrak bios for the Promise 376 controller. Specifically speaking, > > bios interrupt 13h, AH=42 fails to read the requested sector from the > > drive despite the fact that bios interrupt 13h, AH=41, BX=0x55AA > > indicates the drive supports LBA extensions. The only known > > work-around at this time is to limit the size of the primary boot > > partition to 8GB or less and place it below the 8GB boundary where LBA > > extensions are not required to read the drive. I have contacted > > Promise concerning this issue and will provide more updates if > > anything metabolizes. Until then any users experiencing similar issues > > should use the work-around I've described above to boot the operating > > system of their choice. > > For booting with grub only /boot needs to be accessible by the BIOS, > so it's common to make /boot a separate partition early on the disk > with / and other partitions higher up. > > This is the first I've heard of any Promise SATA controller having > such lame limitations. > A small update to this. It seems the above mentioned interrupt fails somewhere around the 128GB boundary. Interrupt 13h, AH=42 uses a 64 bit sector address and should be capable of addressing the entire drive. For a SATA controller, this limitation seems relatively arbitrary. For IDE controllers, a limitation such as this is apparently common. Regards, David Ellingsworth -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
