Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Fergus Wilde <fwilde@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 27 October 2005 10:46, Fergus Wilde wrote:

Sorry about the last one, things falling on keyboard ... several people were 
kind enough to reply to my original query (below), to say they'd had no 
problems with external usb disks > 128GB. I continued to meet this limitation 
if I allowed the automounting facility to handle the usb disk and to give it 
a name under /media. Other oddities included df describing the disk has 
having 0 bytes of 0 total free.  

The disk would declare itself as /dev/sda1, and by setting a conventional 
mountpoint in /etc/fstab I am now able manually to mount and umount the disk, 
with the result that it displays its real size, accurate df readings and so 
on.  So a partial solution only - perhaps the oddities are due to something 
about the usb disk enclosure hardware or firmware.

Thanks to all who emailed me to share their experiences,
Best
Fergus

> Don't think we have done this one recently, apologies if we have:
>
> Having run out of disk space on an external firewire 120 GB drive, I
> thought it would be fun to fit a bigger disk and installed a 400 GB drive
> into the enclosure. No dice, SuSE sees only 128GB of it. Explore, discover
> some enclosures appear to have limitations in this regard. Buy new
> enclosure, this one does USB2 & Firewire, and manufacturers rate it to 400
> GB.
>
> Use YaST partitioner to provide a single partition - success! Partitioner
> sees:
>
> /dev/sda1  372.6GB   Linux native /media/usbdisk  0 48640
>
>
> And the device appears to mount OK:
>
> # mount | grep sda
>
> /dev/sda1 on /media/usbdisk type subfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,sync,fs=reiserfs)
>
> So get on with rsync'ing data across, but it stops :-(  Why?
>
> # df /media/usbdisk/
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1            134202876 134201336      1540 100% /media/usbdisk
>
> So different parts of the system appear to have different views of the disk
> and partition concerned: YaST can see the 400GB disk, but the filesystem
> can apparently only see 128GB again? The machine has ide disks with
> partitions > 128GB without difficulty.
>
> Because it seemed to matter in some related discussions at lists.suse.com:
>
> # rpm -qa | grep hal
>
> hal-0.5.4-6.2
> hal-resmgr-0.1_SVNr59-2
>
> This phenomenon appears in the same way on two separate machines running
> SuSE 10. Anyone got a clue how to get the system to 'see' the remaining
> part of the disk in the same way the YaST partitioner appears to see it? I
> do realise that there may be hardware issues here, but it would be very
> interesting to hear from anyone who has a large external usb2 or firewire
> disk running successfully.
> Cheers
> Fergus