DaniS506: boot from >512MB; removable eSATA
Ilya Zakharevich
size. Do I read it right that with Dani's S506 driver, I can boot
from 2TB disks (I just got a PATA<-->SATA adapter for $4, so suddently
became very interested ;-)?
Thanks,
Ilya
P.S. BTW, are eSATA drives removable with Dani's driver? I see that
at least non-e SATA are not (with my current 1.7.10; physically,
drives ARE external, just that they are connected via plain
SATA). At least "eject" fails on them...
James J. Weinkam
A year or so ago I tried to install eCS on a 640GB SATA drive. Initially I was
unable to get eCS to see more than 500GB. I corresponded with Dani on the
problem and she said that in order to get OS/2 or eCS to see all of a drive
larger than 500GB, it is necessary to zero out the MBR and initialize and
partition the drive using up-to-date OS/2 tools. The reason is that there are
kernel calls which cannot be changed that use 16 bit values to specify the
drive geometry. This means that OS/2 must use a geometry with <65536
cylinders. This in turn means that the claimed number of heads and/or sectors
must be nonstandard.
With the version that was current at the time, I found that it was also
necessary to create all volumes in one LVM session. Once LVM committed the
changes and exited, any attempt to reinvoke it gave a message stating that the
partition table was corrupt. LVM would still come up and you could go through
the motions of creating more volumes or making other changes but LVM would not
commit them. The only thing it would do correctly is hide a volume or change a
drive letter. This was not an insurmountable problem since DFSee worked ok.
Once the drive was partitioned, eCS booted from the drive and could see the
entire 640GB. Also, if we plugged the drive into a windows system, windows
could see the whole drive and could read and write correctly to partitions
with a windows compatible file system. However, we were unable to get windows
to boot from the drive with the OS/2 geometry.
Allan
> I see that Dani's docs do not mention any restriction of boot drive
> size. Do I read it right that with Dani's S506 driver, I can boot
> from 2TB disks (I just got a PATA<-->SATA adapter for $4, so suddently
> became very interested ;-)?
OS2DASD does not support bootable drives larger than 512GB
according to its docs.
>P.S. BTW, are eSATA drives removable with Dani's driver? I see that
> at least non-e SATA are not (with my current 1.7.10; physically,
> drives ARE external, just that they are connected via plain
> SATA). At least "eject" fails on them...
Did you add /BAY option ?
--
Allan.
It is better to close your mouth, and look like a fool,
than to open it, and remove all doubt.
Ilya Zakharevich
> OS2DASD does not support bootable drives larger than 512GB
> according to its docs.
I know; THIS is why I asked... And, according to another followup,
may be bogus (they MIGHT mean one needs not <= 512GB, but <= 0xFFFF
cylinders; but maybe not, and they have an extra restriction...).
>>P.S. BTW, are eSATA drives removable with Dani's driver? I see that
>> at least non-e SATA are not (with my current 1.7.10; physically,
>> drives ARE external, just that they are connected via plain
>> SATA). At least "eject" fails on them...
> Did you add /BAY option ?
/BAY on SATA channels enables SATA and SATAPI device hotplugging. This
is particularly useful with hot-swap disk enclosures.
I see this now... (No, I did not.) Still, it is not clear how this
is supported. Do I need to eject (all?) filesystems on the drive
first? Is it working at suspend time, or always?
Thanks,
Ilya
Allan
/BAY option is alway active - you will see your drives gets other
icons in the drive folder (indicating removable)
/BAY was originally meant for dockingstations, but should work
for any device these days.
I think you only need to eject 1 volume.
At least - that works fine for me with USB sticks with more than
one partition. Yes, not same device driver, but I assume the
system handles this equal
Ted Edwards
> I think you only need to eject 1 volume.
> At least - that works fine for me with USB sticks with more than
> one partition. Yes, not same device driver, but I assume the
> system handles this equal
I have some USB external hard drives of capacities varying up to and
including 500GB. A couple have more than one partition. After an
eject, I tend to check with the drives object to make sure the drive was
properly ejected. In all cases ejecting one partition ejected the
entire drive.
Ted