[vdr] Re: AW: Problem with large drives?

[<apieper@gmx.net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [vdr] AW: Problem with large drives? (24-Apr-2002 11:43)
From:    LBlaeser@hofheim.de
To:      vdr@linuxtv.org

> > I just mounted my 120Gb Windows drive over smb to /video3.
> > Since then vdr exits with "Folating point exception" when i enter the
> > main menu (seems to be the free space clacing). 
> > A friend also experienced this (he used a 80Gb drive, also 
> > mounted over
> > smb), he repartioned to 2x40gb and the problems where gone.
> > 
> > I don't know if this is smb related.
> > Has any one of you used drives of that size "in one piece" 
> > succesfully?
> > 
> > Cu Ulrich
> 
> hi,
> 
> had the same prob under same conditions (120GB Maxtor, Suse 7.3, 80GB FAT32 
> partition as /video), first time i had the error was as the first recording 
> passed the 64GB borderline
> 
> prob is linux code related, all vfat (fat32 is a vfat-type) partitions >
> 64GB will not mount correctly because the size-calc its a singned integer 
> number, i pathed the source to unsigned integer and the limit is now 128GB, 
> after recompiling i had no further problems with that
> 
> "During our testing we realized that linux fat 
> implementation doesn't support partitions larger than 128GB(actually 64GB 
> because of a bug in fat implementation).
> This limitation is imposed by the data structures used by the linux fat 
> implementation to read/write directory entries. A 'long' data type is used 
> to access directory entries on the disk, of which only 28 bits are used to 
> identify the sector that contains the directory entry and the rest 4 bits 
> are used to specify offset of the directory entry inside the sector. Using 
> 28 bits to identify a sector means we cannot access sectors beyond 128GB 
> (2^28*512), thus limiting us from creating partitions larger than 128GB on 
> large disk drives.
> Vijay Kumar (jkumar@qualcomm.com)"

Maybe i got something wrong but i don't see the point where linux has
to do anything with drive-geometry while accessing something over smb.

My vdr-box has a 120GB Maxtor build in - no problems.
Aside from that a directory from a nt-server is mounted in
the vdr-videodir, 153GB - no problems, too.

System: debian woody, kernel 2.4.17, no modifications in kernel.

...Andreas