[vdr] Re: AW: Maxtor 160 GB

[Carsten Koch <Carsten.Koch@icem.de>]

Marco wrote:
...
> Well, at last, I bought a Promise Ultra 133 IDE controller for 78 EUR
> (www.kmelektronik.de). Now the harddisks were correct identified (as
> 157GB disks).
> Now the next problem: the kernel does not support the Promise Ultra 133
> :)
> I tried the ide patches from Hedrick with kernel 2.4.17, but does now
> work.
> But since 2.4.18 is the driver for this promise included.
> 
> I use at the moment kernel 2.4.18-ac2 and it is stabile.
> 
> For everyone, who wants to buy a 160GB disk (or more than 137GB) ->
> first check you controller :)

A new controller is NOT needed, you only need the 48-bit 
LBA kernel patch (or a kerner that has 48-bit LBA already).
Marco, you wasted your 78 EUR. With the patch, the 160GB
disk works full size on most newer controllers.

I also tried a very old Promise Ultra66 controller.
While the correct disk size was detected and could be
used in full, I had occasional data errors using the 
newer Ultra133 120GB and 160GB disks on the Ultra66 
controller. 
So I strongly recommend to run a disk test that writes
and verifies every byte and uses different contents.
badblocks was not able to find these errors, so I wrote
my own test which did find the problem.

Carsten.