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Subject2.0.35 DPT problems or is FDISK bad?
Good morning to everyone on the list.  I hope that this note finds
summer winding up well for everyone.

I have been fighting for the last two days with a DPT 3334UW
controller in a GW2K NS8000 server. The machine is a dual PII-300
with 256 megabyte of RAM running a modular 2.0.35 UP kernel. There
are 4 9 gigabyte drives attached to the controller. The DOS based
storage manager was used to create a single RAID5 array group out of
these drives.

Everything starts up fine and the RAID group is recognized and no
problems are encountered building a minimal root partition on the
composite drive. Problems appear to occur when additional large
filesystems are constructed. Here is the partition layout which
causes problems:

#1 primary: 128Mbytes root
#2 primary: 128Mbytes swap
#3 primary: 1Gbyte var
#4 extended: remainder of array
#5 extpart: 20Gbyte home

When filesystems are built on the #3 or #5 partition the result is
catastrophe. The entire array including the root are annihilated and
the machine locks hard.

The reason I am suspicious of fdisk and the partition table is that
fdisk reports back some strange numbers with respect to the partition
table. Most notably the begin field tops out at 1024 regardless of
what the start field indicates.

Linux views the raid array with a geometry of 26048x64x32 while the
DPT reports back a geometry of 3320x255x63 before the partition table
is written. I used the expert mode of fdisk to force fdisk to view
the drive in the same way as the DPT controller does. Everything
seems to work with the exception that things blow up again when
attempts are made to work with the partitions above 1024 cyclinders.

I am writing this note while we continue to work with the problem and
I can now report that RedHat fails as well. We used the Disk Druid
software to partition the drive and interestingly the begin and start
fields do not coincide on the partition table that is created. The
installation blows up when the 20 gigabyte filesystem is built.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated. I noticed that
in the 112 patch set that an option was added to force the DPT boards
into extended address translation mode. I guess one of the next steps
is to try one of the development kernels to see if we are fighting a
filesystem or driver problem in 2.0.35.

A wish for a pleasant weekend to everyone.

Greg

As always,
Dr. G.W. Wettstein Enjellic Systems Development - Specialists in
4206 N. 19th Ave. intranet based enterprise information solutions.
Fargo, ND 58102 WWW: http://www.enjellic.com
Phone: 701-281-1686 EMAIL: greg@wind.enjellic.com
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