300gb Disk on Solaris 8?
I have added a Maxtor DiamondMax 300gb to my Sun Blade 100 (up to date with Solaris 8). The Format utility sees only 508mb. I have read several references to tricks that can be executed to recognize the full disk but have not seen specifics. Can anyone provide the details?
I have acquired another Sun Blade 100 where I will install Solaris 10, but hoping to get this 300gb drive running on Solaris 8 (otherwise I will be returning the disk for a 120gb model as I understand that is the out of the box limit for this OS).
Any help / pointers appreciated ... I am Han Solo on this environment with no support contract ;-)
# 1
There is no OS limit of 120GB that I'm aware of. Any version of Solaris that you can run on the Blade 100 should be fine with larger disks (older versions of Solaris had various IDE limits, but not near 120 GB).
However many of the older Sun machines use an IDE controller that doesn't directly support LBA-48 addressing. Without that support 128GB (137 GiB) is the maximum usable space for devices on the internal controller.
--
Darren
# 2
Exactly true.
You've indeed observed a hardware limit on the Sunblade 100.
The integrated ATA chipset is not capable of 48bit addressing.
http://www.48bitlba.com/
You're only alternative would be to install a qualified adapter card
and attach a SCSI or FCAL external peripheral.
I vaguely recall someone, somewhen, mentioning they were able to get
an external USB drive recognized, but only as a data drive not a boot disk.
The same goes for a 3rd party IDE PCI card -- only functional after the OS is running.
The SB100 is an eight-year-old design.
Understand that and be pleased that it continues to run.
